Steve and Stephenson chat with papers

Fearless leader Steve Jobs doesn’t talk to the media a whole lot, which is one of those reasons that when he does, people listen carefully. Jobs and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson sat down with both USA Today and the Wall Street Journal to answer some questions about the philosophical underpinnings of Buddhism, their favorite candy, and other favorite things. Like, I don’t know, phones for example.

Of course, half the fun of reading a Steve Jobs interview is watching the reporter ram their heads into the Great Wall of Steve:

WSJ: What do you both envision being added over time to the iPhone, in terms of access to ringtones through Cingular’s (now rebranded AT&T) platform and maybe through some other manner, like turning your iTunes songs into ringtones?

Mr. Jobs: As you may know, iTunes is now the number three distributor of music in the U.S., ahead of Amazon and Target and behind Best Buy and Wal-Mart, and obviously the largest online distributor of music in the world. Of course, you can play that music now on your iPhone. One might imagine a lot of things down the road.

WSJ: Is one of those things offering music purchases and video purchases directly from the phone?

Mr. Jobs: There’s a lot of things you can imagine down the road.

Jobs and Stephenson do dish on a few things, including even Steve lamenting the speed of EDGE:

It turns out EDGE is great for mail, and it works well for maps and a whole bunch of other stuff. Where you wish you had faster speed is…on a Web browser. It’s good enough, but you wish it was a little faster.

And Stephenson says that there’s some chance that AT&T will impelement a system like T-Mobile where handsets can use Wi-Fi hotspots, when available, to route calls instead of the cell network. That would be pretty slick.

And finally, Steve Jobs offers up this statement on the future of Apple marketing, that will have some of us breathing a sigh of relief:

Q: Except for operating system upgrades and Apple TV, the company historically announces a product and then has it for sale immediately. The build-up and hype for the iPhone has been unprecedented — will this change the way you market products?

Jobs: I don’t think we will. We did this, because you have to get certified by the FCC, and things become public. We thought it was better to announce it than to let others do it…It worked well, but most of the time, we will do what we normally do.

Thank heavens.