Mobiles2day - Mobile Industry News

Following Nokia’s announcement last year about launching unlimited music service to all Nokia owners: “Comes With Music”, LG has announced that it will launch it’s own music library called “MusicStation Max”.

LG has teamed up with Omnifone, UK based company that provides this service in 40 countries worldwide. In UK, Vodafone already uses their services.

According to Financial Times, users who buy LG handset will be able to access more than 1.5 million tracks and download them to their handset.

LG promised to make this service available before June 2008, which is ahead of Nokia’s announced music service. It is interesting to see how mobile phone manufacturers are now aggressively trying to enter music market, trying to compete with other electronic music retailers such as Apple’s Itunes. Currently Omnifone has agreement with Universal Music Group to provide music, but will try to sign up other labels as well.

Tracks are delivered in Enhanced Advanced Audio Coding format (eAAC+) over 2.5 or 3G networks.

Do you listen to music on you mobile phone? Do you download full tracks to your mobile? Do you think all these new services that are being launched will be useful to mobile users? Share your thoughts with us!

With Oscars Award ceremony approaching fast, Motorola announced today that they have given each of the Oscar nominees in the directing and four acting categories not-yet-available ROKR E8 handset.

Phone is delivered in custom box, female nominees get fuhsia and male nominees cobalt colored box

Nominees also recieved Motorola S9-HD™ bluetooth headset so they can enjoy music on their new phone.

It is a quad band phone, which supports variety of music formats:

MIDI, MP3, AAC, AAC+, Enhanced AAC+, WMA, WAV, AMR-NB, Real Audio (RA) v10 Microsoft™ music ecosystem

Motorola promises uncompromised consumer experience for music or talk, new patented pending ModeShift technology, which changes music player to phone and vice versa at a touch of a button. Depending on what you are currently using, phone will display ony relevant controls.

There is also FastScroll navigation wheel allows for scrolling through songs, contact and image library with the slide of a thumb.

Other features include 2MP camera, bluetooth support, 2GB internal memory and memory slot up to 4GB.

Quick Specs:

• Dimensions: 115×53x10.6mm
• Band: Quad Band; GPRS/EDGE class 12
• Weight: 100 grams
• Battery: 970mAh
• Display: 2.0″ QVGA 240×320
• Full HTML Browser

Motorola’s website claims that phone will be available 1st quarter of 2008 in US, in Europe probably later in a year.

If you remember I have blogged about Nokia launching music site, now Nokia is expanding it’s online services to N-Gage games. Moreover Nokia has consolidated all of it’s online services under 1 site branded as Ovi.

Site contains following services:

1. Online photo and video sharing
2. Music Store
3. N-Gage games
4. Nokia Maps
5. Calendar and Contact

You can connect to these services using your Nokia mobile phone or PC.

Nokia has moved agressively into mobile content and services in 2007.

Another service Nokia launched previously is Mosh where you can download, upload and share files with other subscribed users. You can download client to your compatible Nokia handset and start using it straight away! Site contains various files, including ringtones, themes, images, videos, widgets, wallpapers and many more.

Today LG Electronics announced new slim slider phone: LG-KF510. According to press release phone is just over 1cm thick (10.9mm), includes 3MP camera and MP3 player.

Phone will be on display at Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, Spain on February 11 - 14, 2008. Phone will be available starting from March 2008.

This fashion phone will be available in Stardust Gray and Sunset Red metal gradation paint schemes.

O2 is changing it’s iPhone tariffs effective from 1st February 2008. Now new and existing customers on certain tariffs will get at least double allowance for the same money! Table below shows comparison of old and new allowances:

As we can see existing customers on £35 per month now get 3 times more inclusive minutes and 2.5 times texts! Customers on £45 now get double of inclusive minutes, £55 tariff is now discontinued and all existing customers on this tariff will be moved to £45. There is 1 new tariff introduced: £75, which gives 3000 minutes and 500 texts inclusive.

O2 informs on their website that existing customers will be upgraded to new tariffs latest by mid March 2008. Customers do not need to do anything, O2 will send sms informing them about changes.

All tariffs come with unlimited (subject to O2 excessive usage policy, check here for details) data and Wi-Fi usage, visual voicemail and reduced roaming rates. Same as before, minimum contract length is 18 months.

If you are new customer, you still have to pay £269 for the handset. Considering that new customers have to pay so much for this ‘Jesus phone’, it is a good move by O2, their tariffs are now more competitive comparing to other mobile operators. In effect O2 is rewarding existing customers and makes iPhone tariffs more attractive to new ones.

What competitors offer for similar monthly payments? Let’s have a look at O2’s basic £35 tariff and compare it to other operators. T-Mobile’s Flext 35 + Web’n'Walk (18 months) gives you up to 900 minutes or 1800 texts and unlimited browsing for £37.5 per month. Vodafone for £35 per month on 18 months contract gives you 500 minutes and 500 texts. As you can see O2’s new iPhone tariffs are a big improvement. The only problem is that other operators give you range of mobile phones for free on these tariffs and some of them are as good as iPhone.

I would say that £269 for iPhone is pretty high and you are tied for next 18 months. O2 and Apple have to cut the price of iPhone like Apple did in US. I am sure many more customers will be joining O2 then.

What do you think?