But every time I wanted to change songs, I had to go to another room and make a few mouse clicks on my computer. Ever since then, I’ve been waiting for someone to come up with a good, affordable remote control that lets me change tunes no matter where I am in the house.

Apple’s Remote program

It turns out, I already owned that device. It’s an iPod touch. A new program released by Apple (AAPL) in July was all it took to convert my MP3 player into a sophisticated remote control for my digital-music collection. That program, called simply Remote, runs on the iPhone as well as on the iPod touch, a version of the Apple MP3 player that has an iPhone-like touch-sensing screen and Internet-access capabilities using Wi-Fi wireless technology. Remote is available free of charge on the online App Store that Apple has used since July to distribute software for those devices.

In essence, Remote is a remote control for all music stored on a Mac or Windows PC that’s loaded into iTunes, Apple’s music jukebox software. It allows you to jump between playlists, browse artists and pump up the volume. For the program to work, you need to buy into using other Apple entertainment products.

In the simplest setup, Remote lets you control the music from stereo speakers connected directly to a PC. But it’s most useful when you use a PC to deliver audio to additional speakers around a home — say, a pair on the patio and in the living room.

Apple sells a couple of products that receive audio signals from a PC running iTunes. Both work wirelessly over a Wi-Fi home network so you don’t need to put holes into your walls to run computer and speaker wires. I tested Remote using both. One is an Apple TV, a $229 set-top box in my living room that plays digital audio and video through a standard home-theater system. The other is an AirPort Express, a $99 Apple wireless networking device on my patio connected to a pair of powered A5 speakers made by Audioengine, of San Jose, Calif. A third set of speakers was connected to an iMac in the kitchen, where I store all of my digital music. (The least expensive iPod touch costs $299.)

It was a breeze to configure the Apple TV and AirPort Express to show up as remote speakers in iTunes on my computer. Setting up Remote to give me mobile control over this array of speakers was trickier. After installing the program on my iPod touch, I couldn’t get it to work with iTunes on my PC. After 20 minutes of fiddling with the security settings for my Wi-Fi base station, iTunes finally recognized Remote. I was in business.

We all know how confusing the remote controls for TV sets and stereo systems can be. Remote, by contrast, cleanly displays all the music on my PC on the color screen of my iPod touch.

The program let me flip through artists, albums and playlists with simple finger swipes. But I was sorry that Remote doesn’t have a feature in the iPod touch called cover flow that lets users browse their music libraries by flipping through album-cover art. Apple says it may offer the feature in the future.

The software also let me easily turn on and off the music from my speakers in my kitchen, living room and patio. I could have all the speakers on at once — good for a party. The sound was terrific. The crisp-sounding $349 Audioengine speakers don’t require a stereo receiver.

Because Remote uses Wi-Fi to communicate with iTunes, I could control music anywhere around my house and backyard, which are small enough to be fully covered with a signal from my Wi-Fi base station. That’s a big plus over conventional remote controls that use infrared, a technology that doesn’t work through walls.

One drawback: The battery in my iPod touch drained overnight when I configured the device to stay connected to iTunes, a feature that increases software responsiveness. Changing the setting let me go days without recharging my iPod touch, but it meant I had to wait a couple of seconds for Remote to connect to iTunes when I started up the software — an acceptable trade-off.

Another multiroom audio product with a good remote control is the ZonePlayer from Sonos, an equipment maker based in Santa Barbara, Calif. That system has some advantages over Apple’s offerings, including the ability to access tunes from online music services, such as Pandora and Rhapsody, and separate volume controls for each set of speakers.

The Sonos system starts at $999 for a remote control and wireless receivers, without speakers, that can deliver music to two rooms.

For people who already own an iPod touch or iPhone, Remote is a good reason to buy an AirPort Express, and fill your home with music.

Walter S. Mossberg is on vacation.

• Email Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com.

About 18 months ago, the giant PC maker brought out an unusual desktop computer called the TouchSmart, a bulky model meant for kitchen counters. It was intended as a walk-up home kiosk, with large icons you could activate by merely touching them to check the weather or to consult your calendar.

This TouchSmart was praised for its originality, but it wasn’t as practical as promised, and wasn’t a big hit. Still, H-P is persevering with the concept. It has refined the hardware and the touch-controlled software, and has come up with a new line set to go on sale by mid-July.

This new TouchSmart, which comes in two models priced at $1,299 and $1,499, is a relatively slim, one-piece desktop with a large 22-inch screen. It resembles the Apple iMac or the Dell XPS One and, like the latter, runs Microsoft’s Windows Vista. It has a wireless keyboard and mouse, and can be used as a normal Vista computer.

But, like the first TouchSmart, this new model comes with H-P’s touch-controlled user interface and special programs designed to be manipulated with your fingers. For this model, H-P is de-emphasizing the idea that the machine is meant for the kitchen, but it is forging ahead strongly with the notion that touch control is the wave of the future.

After testing the new TouchSmart PC for a few days, my verdict is mixed. The TouchSmart software is indeed improved. It’s attractive, more versatile and more practical — and fun to use. The hardware is handsome and well-equipped. And H-P deserves credit for continuing to build software expertise in a world where makers of computers and cellphones must become as expert at software as they are at hardware. But the latest effort has some problems.

The TouchSmart interface is inviting. There’s a top row with huge icons, called tiles, displaying your favorite programs, and a bottom row of smaller tiles for other programs. You can scroll each row with a finger and decide which programs go in which row. You can even include in either row not only TouchSmart programs, but the regular Windows programs or Web sites that you like. When you tap on a tile that isn’t for a special TouchSmart program, the computer pops you into the regular Windows interface. To return to the TouchSmart interface, you just tap a home button below the screen.

Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart

The TouchSmart software includes a calendar, a weather widget, a clock, music and video players, a program for composing short notes, and even a basic Web browser. All worked OK in my tests, but they’re simple and limited.

The computer itself is fairly powerful. Both models have dual-core processors, large hard disks, and a whopping 4 gigabytes of memory. And both run the special 64-bit version of Vista, which allows more memory usage and can be much faster than regular Vista, but only if you buy special 64-bit software programs. This machine is loaded with every conceivable port and connector, mostly hidden from view, and the high-end model even has a TV tuner.

But this is still a Vista computer, with all of the disadvantages that entails, especially a sluggish start-up and an annoying barrage of pop-up warnings. And the new TouchSmart is preloaded with craplets, those irritating trial programs and come-ons that you didn’t order.

There’s a built-in Webcam that works in low light, but it’s almost impossible to tilt the computer forward to get the best shot. Plus, the TouchSmart software interface is very basic and is ragged around the edges. It isn’t a multitouch interface — like the ones on the Apple iPhone and in the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7, that recognize a variety of gestures and perform different tasks when multiple fingers are used rather than just one. For example, you can’t rotate a photo on the TouchSmart by grabbing it with your fingers, or move back and forth through Web pages by swiping the browser with your fingers.

The TouchSmart software is just a thin shell plopped on top of Vista, and it crashed on me four times during the course of a few days of testing. Also, the limitations of the TouchSmart applications can be frustrating. The photo application wouldn’t let me create albums. The music application didn’t display artist names for some of my MP3 files, and the calendar application can’t display an onscreen reminder of an event if you’re working in the main Vista interface.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of a quick and simple interface on a handsome one-piece Vista machine, the TouchSmart might make sense. But it doesn’t deliver on the full promise of touch computing.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Forget next month. It’s more fun thinking about what digital toys Apple might be making in five years. Of course, Mr. Jobs’s penchant for secrecy means such predictions are often little more than daydreaming. Just do an Internet search for “Apple” and “mockup” to see photos of products invented by Apple fans.

Forrester Research (FORR) is the latest to look into the crystal ball in a new report that imagines the Apple products of 2013. But rather than predict Apple jet packs or other outlandish new directions, the research firm uses the company’s recent history as a guide to forecasting.

Forrester’s conclusion: While much of Apple’s great successes have been mobile products such as the iPod and the iPhone, the company will seek to colonize rooms throughout the home.

Among the new products Forrester predicts Apple will create are wall-mountable digital picture frames with small high-definition screens and speakers that wirelessly play media, including photos, videos and music, stored on a computer elsewhere in the home. Such products already exist, but Apple could put its own twist on them — for example, by adding its design panache and a touch-sensitive screen that lets viewers flip from image to image with a finger swipe, a la the iPhone.

For the bedroom, Forrester envisions an Apple “clock radio” that pipes in music and other media across a home network. Possible, too, is an “AppleSound” universal remote control, also with a touch-sensitive screen, that lets users browse their music collections and change the songs playing through their stereo as they stroll around the house. This latter technology is already available in primitive form through an application called Signal (www.alloysoft.com) that turns the iPod touch and the iPhone into remote controls for Apple’s iTunes program.

Forrester also thinks Apple could extend into the home the technical assistance currently offered by “Genius Bar” personnel in Apple retail stores. Apple in-home installation services will become especially important as its array of products for the home grows. “The complexity level here can be quite daunting if you have five or six of these different devices,” says J.P. Gownder, one of the Forrester analysts who wrote the report.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s product plans.

Apple prognosticating is such a popular pastime, in part, because Mr. Jobs has proved so adept at becoming a power broker in markets a Silicon Valley computer company — once known as Apple Computer — has no right to dominate. The iPod remains the top MP3 player, with more than 70% of the market, and Apple is now the top retailer of music in the nation, ahead of Wal-Mart (WMT) Stores. Less than a year after entering the cellphone business with the iPhone, Apple became the second-largest provider of smart phones in the U.S.

That said, the company had an underwhelming foray into the living room with a television set-top device called Apple TV that plays music, photos and movies downloaded from the Internet and PCs on a home network. In an interview earlier this year after dropping the price on the product by $70 to $229, Mr. Jobs said he was disappointed in its sales.

Despite the hiccups, veteran observers of Apple say Mr. Jobs’s intent is clear. “I see everything Steve is doing as positioning himself to take over completely the living room,” says John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and the former director of Xerox’s PARC, the Palo Alto, Calif., research center that inspired some of the innovations of the original Macintosh.

One long-running prediction, proved wrong again and again: that Apple might make a television set. Forrester throws cold water on the idea. Yet some still believe that Apple will one day get into the business as conventional TV makers start to integrate into their sets the ability to surf the Web. Apple already designs computer displays that are as large as some HDTVs.

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple with Mr. Jobs, says it would make “a lot of sense” for Apple to do a television set that can also access media stored on the Internet and local PCs. “I only started thinking that way recently,” Mr. Wozniak says. “Apple is obviously in the world of delivering display devices already.”

Mr. Brown thinks Apple could simplify the traditional functions on TV sets, like the bewildering electronic programming guides that list the hundreds of channels available to viewers. “Most people find operating high-quality TV systems incredibly awkward,” he says. “They’re as bad as our computer systems.”

• Send comments to Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com. Walter S. Mossberg will return on June 5.

So, I have steered away from recommending Linux, the free computer operating system that is the darling of many techies and IT managers, and a challenger to Microsoft’s dominant Windows and Apple’s resurgent Macintosh operating system, OS X. Linux, which runs on the same hardware as Windows, has always required much more technical expertise and a yen for tinkering than average users possess.

Lately, however, I’ve received a steady stream of emails from readers urging me to take a look at a variant of Linux called Ubuntu, which, these folks claimed, is finally polished enough for a mainstream user to handle. My interest increased when Dell began to sell a few computer models preloaded with Ubuntu instead of Windows.

I’ve been testing one of those Dell Ubuntu computers, a laptop called the Inspiron 1420N. I evaluated it strictly from the point of view of an average user, someone who wouldn’t want to enter text commands, hunt the Web for drivers and enabling software, or learn a whole new user interface. I focused on Ubuntu and the software programs that come bundled with it, not on the hardware, which is a pretty typical Dell laptop.

My verdict: Even in the relatively slick Ubuntu variation, Linux is still too rough around the edges for the vast majority of computer users. While Ubuntu looks a lot like Windows or Mac OS X, it is full of little complications and hassles that will quickly frustrate most people who just want to use their computers, not maintain or tweak them.

Before every passionate Linux fan attacks that conclusion, let me note that even the folks who make and sell Ubuntu agree with it. Mark Shuttleworth, the South African-born founder of the Ubuntu project, told me this week that “it would be reasonable to say that this is not ready for the mass market.” And Dell’s Web site for its Ubuntu computers warns that these machines are for “for advanced users and tech enthusiasts.”

So, what do I mean when I say Ubuntu is too rough around the edges for average users? Here are some examples.

There is no control panel for adjusting the way the touch pad works, and I found it so sensitive that I was constantly launching programs and opening windows accidentally by touching the thing. Every time the computer awoke from sleep, the volume control software crashed and had to be reloaded.

When I tried to play common audio and video files, such as MP3 songs, I was told I had to first download special files called codecs that are built into Windows and Mac computers. I was warned that some of these codecs might be “bad” or “ugly.”

To get the computer to recognize my Kodak camera and Apple iPod, I had to reboot it several times. When it did find the iPod, it wasn’t able to synchronize with it. Playing videos was a bad experience, with lots of flickering and freezing. Oh, and there’s no built-in software for playing commercial DVDs.

The Ubuntu-equipped Inspiron 1420N starts at $744, but the configuration that Dell lent me for testing sells for $1,415. The same unit equipped with Windows Vista costs $1,524. The Ubuntu version includes OpenOffice, the free office suite that competes with Microsoft Office. Dell charges an added $149 for Microsoft Office.

Ubuntu and other versions of Linux have several advantages. Unlike Windows and OS X, they’re free. Unlike Mac OS X, they can be run on the least-expensive popular hardware configurations. Unlike Windows, but like the Mac, they are essentially free of viruses and spyware. And unlike Windows and Mac OS X, they are built and constantly improved by a world-wide network of developers, professional and amateur — the so-called open-source concept that produced the excellent Firefox Web browser.

It makes sense that all the best software brains can’t be located in just two places: Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft is based, and Cupertino, Calif., Apple’s base. And plenty of people reading this have had lots of frustrations with the two better-known operating systems, especially Windows, whose latest iteration, Vista, is disappointing in many ways.

But open source is a two-edged sword. While it draws on smart developers from many places, nobody is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product, and open-source developers often have an imperfect feel for how average people use software. A European company called Canonical is the “commercial sponsor” of Ubuntu and provides support. But it’s largely focused on corporate and techie users. Average Ubuntu users are likely to have to wade through online forums, often written in technical language, to get help.

Dell and Canonical tell me there are complex workarounds for some of the problems I encountered, and that built-in improvements are planned for others. But for now, I still advise mainstream, nontechnical users to avoid Linux.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Some devices, like Treos and full-size BlackBerrys, opt for the larger size and the keyboard, while others assume you’ll peck out email or Web addresses on a phone keypad.

I’ve been testing a new $295 smart phone from Helio, an upstart company based in Los Angeles, that provides an elegant solution to this design problem. It’s called the Helio Ocean and it can look like either a standard voice phone or a keyboard-equipped email and Web device, depending on which way you open its unusual two-way sliding mechanism.

The Ocean also has some very nice software touches to complement this clever hardware design.

It isn’t as slender as some of its competitors and it has a few downsides, but the Ocean is an innovative, thoughtfully designed smart phone that advances the state of the art. It goes on sale over the next week or so at helio.com and in some retail stores later this month.

Helio not only designed the Ocean, but the phone works on Helio’s own cellphone service, which runs on Sprint’s network at broadband speeds. It lacks Wi-Fi wireless networking.

Plans with unlimited data access range from $65 to $135 a month, depending on the number of voice minutes. For $145 a month, you can get unlimited data and minutes.

When closed, the Ocean is just a roomy screen with some buttons at the top and bottom of a black rectangular body with rounded corners. If you hold it vertically with the screen in portrait mode and slide the screen up, a standard phone keypad is revealed that you can hold to your ear when making calls, just as on a standard voice phone.

If you turn the Ocean horizontally so its screen is in landscape mode and slide it up, a full typing keyboard is revealed that puts you in a comfortable position to compose messages and surf the Web. All the main functions are available in both modes and you can use a headset in either mode.

The software is smart, too. When you physically switch the Ocean from one orientation to the other, the screen display switches between portrait and landscape modes automatically. If you answer the phone while in horizontal landscape mode and you aren’t using a headset, the call automatically is placed in speakerphone mode, because it would be clumsy to hold the Ocean to your ear in that configuration. If you slide the keyboard closed and switch to vertical mode, the call continues and the speakerphone is automatically turned off.

When closed, the Ocean looks a bit stubby but it’s actually slightly smaller in every dimension than a Treo 700 — although it gets larger when the keyboard is exposed.

Voice calls were clear and crisp, and the speakerphone function worked well. It was easy to add numbers to the address book.

From the main screen, you can just start typing anything and the Ocean will either search your address book for the characters you type or initiate a Web search. Web-search results are presented in multiple search engines, including Google and Yahoo, Amazon and Wikipedia, which are arrayed in tabs.

I found the keyboard easy to use and was able to attain good accuracy on it while typing with my thumbs. However, the space between the top row of keys and the bottom edge of the screen is a bit cramped; it took some adjustment to thumb-type well on that row of keys.

The Ocean comes preconfigured for all the major consumer email services, including Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Gmail. You can manually add others. The Ocean also supports Microsoft Exchange email.

Unlike a Treo or a Windows Mobile phone, the Ocean doesn’t allow editing of Microsoft Office documents. You can only view them as text files and, in my tests, even that didn’t work. Helio plans new software that would allow the documents to display properly.

Similarly, the Ocean works out of the box with a variety of instant messaging services, including AIM, Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger. It also has multiple media functions. It sports a two-megapixel camera with flash and decent built-in software for displaying photos, and playing music and videos. It also accepts memory cards for expanded storage.

You can simply plug the Ocean into a Windows or Macintosh computer and drag photos, songs and videos onto its internal memory or memory card, if they are in a supported format. But in my tests of this, some photos wouldn’t display properly and none of the album art showed up in my MP3 songs. Helio says the album art will show up if you use synchronization software on Windows, instead of simply dragging the files over.

Despite some limitations, the Helio Ocean is an impressive device that’s fun to use.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Partisans of these platforms can argue all day about which is better. But the competitors have some things in common. Windows computers and Apple Macintoshes can both display the same photos and office documents, and play the same MP3 songs and YouTube videos. BlackBerrys and Treos can receive the same emails and call the same phone numbers.

It isn’t perfect. There are some files that don’t play well across platforms. But most common content does.

Yet there’s another technology competition that doesn’t share content well and offers few, if any, benefits to consumers. It’s the fight among two groups of technology companies and movie studios to sell a successor to the DVD. Each has developed a new type of disc that has the ability to show movies in high definition. To my eye, the pictures they deliver are identical.

Neither of these competing new discs, called Blu-ray and HD-DVD, works in current DVD players. They require very expensive new players, and the new players can’t handle both new disc formats, only one or the other.

Adding to the annoyance: Some movie studios release movies only in one of the two formats. Paramount and Warner Brothers support both formats, but Universal supports only HD-DVD, and Disney, Fox and Sony only Blu-ray.

So, in order to be sure you can play any movie released as a high-definition disc, you would have to replace your old DVD player with two new, much costlier players. It would be like having to buy separate TV sets to watch different networks’ programs.

Now, however, one gutsy company, LG Electronics, of Korea, a longtime member of the Blu-ray camp, has broken ranks and introduced a new combo player that can handle three formats: Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and regular old DVDs. It’s called the BH100 Super Multi Blue.

I’ve tested this combo player and found that it plays both new formats, as well as regular DVDs, just fine. But it’s more expensive than most single-format players and has some serious limitations when navigating through the menus on HD-DVD titles. For now, I can only recommend it for serious videophiles with deep pockets, but I’m hoping it’s the start of a trend that will end the foolish war.

The BH100 costs $1,200. That’s vastly more expensive than the newest DVD players, which, for less than $100, can take a regular DVD and “upscale” it so it looks better on a high-definition set. But that $1,200 isn’t so outrageous if you compare it with the price of buying two separate Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, which can reach or exceed $1,000 total. And the new LG takes up only one input on your TV, occupies less space on your component shelf and requires just one remote control.

I tested the LG combo player on my high-definition TV with this year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “The Departed,” and with “Superman Returns,” each of which is available in both of the new formats, as well as on DVD.

All played perfectly. The picture looked great in both formats and was noticeably better than an upscaled DVD image, which the LG unit also can produce. The LG outputs both new formats in a high, but grossly overhyped, resolution called “1080p.”

But the BH100 did a much better job with the Blu-ray discs than with the HD-DVD titles. That’s because while the combo player can play HD-DVD movies perfectly, it can’t display the HD-DVD discs’ menus for selecting scenes or accessing special features.

These menus usually offer the title and a photo to identify a scene, and the title and/or a description of the special feature. But on the LG BH100, the HD-DVD menus have no pictures, titles, or descriptions and look nothing like the original. They only identify scenes by number and duration. That makes it hard to find, say, the deleted scenes from “The Departed,” or the documentaries on the Superman disc.

The BH100 was based on a Blu-ray-only player and lacks the special chips HD-DVD players use to display the menus properly. LG had to concoct its own rudimentary replacements for those menus. The company says a future combo model could include the chips and thus display the HD-DVD menus as well as it does the Blu-ray menus, but it hasn’t decided whether to make such a product.

One reason for that decision may be the competing approach to solving the stupid disc war. Warner Brothers is working on a combo disc, instead of a combo player. This disc would hold both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD versions of a movie, so you could pop it into whichever type of player you own.

Until the electronics and movie companies support universal high-definition players and/or universal high-definition discs, I don’t recommend that most people invest in either technology. Why prolong a war that’s bad for consumers?

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

The Chocolate can make and receive phone calls and text messages, but it’s designed as a music player first. In fact, it was crafted to look like an Apple iPod, right down to its most prominent feature, a navigation wheel. Verizon is heavily hyping the Chocolate, hoping to capture some of the same sort of buzz that catapulted the iPod, and later Motorola’s RAZR phone, into the status of cult-style accessories.

The Chocolate will hit Verizon stores next week and is available at Verizon’s site for $150.

While the Chocolate may look like an iPod, however, it doesn’t work like one. In fact, as a music player, it functions like an iPod designed by a committee. It’s burdened by a ham-handed user interface and other failings that would get its designers fired at Apple. As a result, the Chocolate, which I’ve been testing for a week or so, isn’t as good a music phone as, say, the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone.

The Chocolate is available now at Verizon’s Web site for $150, after a $50 rebate, with a two-year contract. It will reach Verizon’s stores next week. If you’re serious about using it for music, however, you’ll have to shell out an additional $100 for a 2-gigabyte memory card, which can hold about 500 songs in standard MP3 format. That’s because, incredibly, the Chocolate comes without a memory card, and has a pitiful 64 megabytes of internal memory for storing songs.

This phone is handsome. It’s a black slider design, small and light. Unless you slide it open, the phone keypad is hidden and all you see are the roomy screen, the navigation wheel and glowing red control indicators. It has a decent camera that can take still pictures and crude videos. Unlike an iPod, the Chocolate can play music through a built-in speaker, which sounded very good to my ears.

The best user interface elements on the Chocolate are two buttons on the right side, which take you directly to the music player and camera functions, so you don’t have to wade through menus. These buttons are called out by little labels at the right edge of the screen. But it’s downhill from there.

One big problem is that cool-looking wheel. It turns out that, unlike on the iPod, it isn’t a wheel at all — just a common five-way navigation pad made to look like an iPod wheel (in the popular European model of the Chocolate, it had a rectangular shape). While it is touch sensitive, like the iPod’s wheel, you can’t scroll with it by moving your finger across it in a circular motion. You have to press the buttons in the middle and at the corners.

Worse, the touch sensitivity is poor. While you can adjust how sensitive the wheel buttons are, I found them to be either so sensitive that it was easy to accidentally activate them, or so insensitive that you had to hit them twice — hard — to get things done.

In another bad design decision, the “end” button that terminates calls, turns the phone on and off, and gets you back to the home screen, has been moved from its traditional position across from the “send” button to the side of the phone. This requires a major adjustment and is awkward, because the button is very small.

The music application itself is pretty standard, but is full of unwelcome surprises. For instance, when you turn on the phone, you can’t start listening to music immediately if you store your songs on the memory card, because the player has to load the songs from the card each time. You can set the player to shuffle through your songs, but if you manually advance to the next tune, it goes in order, rather than picking a random song.

And the Chocolate doesn’t handle your MP3 files properly. I loaded the card with 208 very standard, unprotected MP3 files — files that are perfectly recognized on all computers, phones and portable devices I’ve tested. But the Chocolate failed to read the song information — artist, title, album — on all but a handful of them. So I could select them only by file name.

I had a similar problem with my personal photos. Of the 16 picture files I loaded onto the card — again, standard files I’ve used to test numerous devices — the Chocolate could display only four.

In fact, the Chocolate’s multimedia features are really designed mainly to encourage users to buy songs, pictures and videos from Verizon’s online download and streaming services — VCast and Get It Now — not to let you use your own content. The phone works much better with $2 songs you buy from VCast (twice what Apple charges) than with free songs you load onto it.

This is the opposite of Apple’s model. Its iTunes Music Store exists to sell iPods, and the iPod works perfectly with music from other sources, even if you never buy a song from Apple.

I do believe that, someday, the merger of the cellphone and the music player will result in a great device for consumers. But the Chocolate isn’t it.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

In the component model, many companies make hardware and software that run on a standard platform, creating inexpensive commodity devices that don’t always work perfectly together, but get the job done. In the end-to-end model, one company designs both the hardware and software, which work smoothly together, but the products cost more and limit choice.

In the first war between these models, the war for dominance of the personal-computer market, Microsoft’s approach won decisively. Aided by efficient assemblers like Dell, and by corporate IT departments employed to integrate the components, Microsoft’s component-based Windows platform crushed Apple’s end-to-end Macintosh platform.

But in the post-PC era we’re in today, where the focus is on things like music players, game consoles and cellphones, the end-to-end model is the early winner. Tightly linking hardware, software and Web services propelled Apple to a huge success with its iPod. Microsoft, meanwhile, has struggled to make its component model work on these devices and, in a telling sign, is using the Apple end-to-end model itself in its Xbox game-console business. Now, Apple is working on other projects built on the same end-to-end model as the iPod: a media-playing cellphone and a home-media hub.

The jury is still out on whether the end-to-end model will prevail in the long term. Many at Microsoft, and some outside analysts as well, believe the new devices will eventually succumb to the component model, and that Apple’s success with the iPod will fade, just as its early dominance of the PC market did. Apple officials say history won’t repeat itself if the company continues to make great products and avoid the business blunders committed by its past management.

I think the end-to-end model can prevail this time, both for Apple and other companies. Consumers want choice and low prices. But they also crave the kind of simplicity and integration that the end-to-end model delivers best.

Sure, you can get more variety in music players and in online music services if you opt for the Microsoft-based music instead of the iPod system. But the iPod, Apple’s iTunes software, and the iTunes Music Store work so well together that users can just relax and enjoy the music. By contrast, the hodgepodge of players, software and online music stores on the Microsoft side frequently have trouble synchronizing between computers and players. Apple sells as many or more songs than the many stores that use Microsoft software.

Critics attack the iPod and iTunes as “closed” and “proprietary,” because the songs Apple sells at its iTunes Music Store play only on iPods, and iPods can’t play songs purchased from other music stores. But both the iPod and iTunes handle the two most common open audio formats, MP3 and WAV, and the most common open video format, MP4. They work well even if you never buy a song from Apple. And iTunes and the iPod work on Windows computers, not just Macs. So how is that closed?

Even the Mac isn’t as closed as its critics charge. It’s still designed to work with Apple’s own operating system and software. But it can handle all the common files Windows uses, can network with Windows machines, and can use all of the common Windows printers, scanners, keyboards and mice. The Mac gives you the same access to the Internet as Windows. Heck, the newest Macs can even run Windows itself.

You do get a choice of more software with Windows. And that’s great for hard-core gamers and users of corporate, or niche, software. But for mainstream users doing typical tasks, the Windows choice advantage is illusory. Mac users can choose among thousands of third-party programs, including multiple Web browsers, word processors and email programs. They can run Mac versions of popular software like Microsoft Office and the Firefox browser. How much more choice do you need?

Microsoft is hedging its bets. It has, in effect, created a little Apple inside Microsoft with the Xbox group. The Xbox team shunned Windows and wrote its own operating system and user interface, and built its own hardware. (The new Xbox was even developed using Macintosh computers.)

Some Microsoft officials dismiss this anomaly by claiming that the game-console business is a special case. But now, Microsoft has assigned the Xbox team to create a portable music player it hopes can knock off the iPod. Why? Because the company is frustrated that the component model, which separates hardware and software, has failed in the music market. It’s looking for more integration.

Still, the end-to-end model isn’t a lock. If Apple can’t keep churning out cool products at reasonable prices, it could crash and burn. Unlike Microsoft, it doesn’t have much help from other companies to succeed. But the iPod experience has shown that the PC model may not be best for all digital devices.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.