Digital Jukebox

Nokia to offer music downloads service

Nokia may be lagging behind in the multimedia stakes, but the company seems intent on doing something about its slipping popularity. After Motorola’s recent deal with Apple to get iTunes onto its handsets, Nokia has struck a similar deal with Loudeye.

Loudeye doesn’t actually offer a music downloads service itself, but it does help other companies to set up online music stores. While this may mean that Nokia is intent on creating its own music downloads service, the chances are that it’s an attempt to encourage network providers to develop their own stores. Which will in turn encourage the networks to buy more Nokia handsets.

Many of the networks, such as O2 and Orange, already offer a music download service and this is obviously something they see as a growth market worth pursuing. Offering music downloads to subscribers represents an appealing extra service to customers, as well as a nice little extra earner – especially if a company like Loudeye is doing all the hard work setting it up for you.

With phones already offering music storage and playback facilities, how long is it going to be before iPods and their ilk are an endangered species? While some manufacturers still firmly believe that people will still want to keep their gadgets separate, there’s strong reasons to believe that hybridised mobile handsets will be the way forward – especially if phone companies continue to pursue that market.

Loudeye press release

Now its music downloads via your mobile

As we have been predicting for some time, T-Mobile has joined Orange and O2 in offering music downloads direct to mobile phones. Its Music Jukebox service went live this week offering users 500 truncated tracks (they are about two minutes long) to choose from.

T-Mobile’s player is integrated into a range of phones and the company has promised to have 250,000 full length tracks available with a large number of Muisic Jukebox equipped handsets for Christmas.

Bizarrely T-Mobile’s subscribers in the UK pay £1.50 per two minute track, a third more than subscribers in the network’s home German market who will pay 1.50 Euros and much more than PC-based download services.

O2 has responded by announcing that its first handset to access its digital music service will reach the stores in August. Its Digital Music Player software has been incorporated into the tiny Siemens smartphone the SX1.

O2 is way ahead of its rivals in terms of tracks with up to 100,000 ready for download.

There’s more on this story here from The Guardian.

Is the mobile phone the new iPod?

And on the day that Apple’s iTunes music download service launches in the UK comes news from Japan which could spell the beginning of the end for the iPod.

If, like us, you are fed up of lumbering round with a pocket full of gadgets, be cheered. For you’ll soon be able to jettison your PDA and your iPod and just take your mobile phone with you.

For the word on the streets of Tokyo is that mini hard disk drives less than one inch in size with storage capacities of as much as 20Gigabytes will soon be incorporated into mobile phones.

According to JP Morgan’s Japanese analyst Kazuyo Katsuma a phone capable of storing thousands of music track and images could be hitting the Tokyo market as early as spring 2005.

The hard disk devices will also store video footage as many new Japanese phones now incorporate TV tuners.

The arrival of a hard disk in a phone is what we European gadget freaks have been waiting for. Over the next few years we will have TV tuners, video recorders and three mega pixel cameras in phones. All the phones needed was a decent amount of storage and that’s where Tosh, Seagate and Hitach, who will all have sub one inch hard disks available by the end of the year, step in.

Having effectively killed off the PDA is the smartphone now going to capture the personal music market? Well, in the US they might have a slightly different take, but in Europe it seems like a dead cert.