Posts filed under Mobile Music
CES 2006: Motorola Music Duo integrates mobile phones with your iPod
January 4th, 2006
Finally from Motorola at CES 2006 (for the meantime, anyway!), comes the Motorola Music Duo, a Bluetooth adapter for iPods. The Music Duo lets you listen to the music from your iPod wirelessly over Bluetooth using your shiny new Motorola HT820 headphones. If a call comes in on your mobile phone, the music is muted and you take the call through the headphones. Genius! And certainly a better way of integrating with iTunes than the lousy ROKR!
Not all of Motorola’s Bluetooth announcements have been useful, but with the integration of music devices, headphones and mobile phones, Bluetooth at last seems to have found a useful niche for itself in integrating different gadgets.
Read more about the Motorola Music Duo after the jump.
[Source: Motorola, SlashPhone]
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CES 2006: Motorola tries again with the Motorola ROKR E2
January 4th, 2006
Motorola have announced the new Motorola ROKR E2 – another Motorola iTunes phone, but this time with real storage (2GB), and, er, no iTunes! Instead, the ROKR E2 abandons iTunes in favour of Motorola’s own iRadio.
Looking much better than the dismal ROKR E1, the new Motorola ROKR E2 also offers much more features as well. However, the original ROKR is not the phone this thing has to beat: the competition currently is Sony Ericsson’s Walkman range of mobile music phones, such as the W800 and W900, not to mention Samsung and Nokia’s hard-disk-enabled mobile music phones.
So what does the new ROKR E2 have to offer? Can it beat the competition? Read on for more details of the Motorola ROKR E2 after the jump.
[Source: Motorola, Engadget, Gizmodo]
CES 2006: Motorola iRadio service – fluff and hype?
January 4th, 2006
Motorola’s new iRadio service, also announced at CES 2006 (where else?!) sounds intriguing. You use a compatible mobile phone, such as the new Motorola ROKR E2, to store up to 6 radio ‘channels’, which you can then listen to either via a set of headphones, or your car or home stereo. Theoretically, this sounds like a great idea. Using just your mobile phone, you can control your music and pipe it through whichever hi-fi quality technology you happen to be near. Sounds cool, but look beyond the hype, and you find the reality of the service not quite as good as it sounds…
Read more about the Motorola iRadio Service after the jump.
[Source: Motorola, Engadget, Gizmodo]
Orange Calling Tunes for annoying people
December 3rd, 2005
[Source: Pocket-Lint]
Vodafone and Universal partner for new music download service
November 14th, 2005
Vodafone has announced it is joining forces with Universal Music to offer its customers a music download service with tunes frrm Universal’s catalogue of 600,000 songs. The agreement, announced today, will see the introduction of a broad range of products and services featuring such market-leading stars as Eminem, U2, Black Eyed Peas, Kaiser Chiefs, 50 Cent, Keane, Rammstein, and Scissor Sisters. The new partnership between Vodafone and UMG’s Universal Music Group International (UMGI) division represents the world’s most extensive offering of music for mobile, including:
- Realtones and ringback tones
- Full-track audio downloads
- Full-track video downloads
- Video streaming
The service will be part of Vodafone Live! and is intended for 3G only. However, they key part of the service, price, has not been announced yet. If Vodafone price this too high (and remember, they’ll be competing with iTunes and P2P networks), then file this under “failure”. The only advantage any mobile phone music service has over traditional ways of getting music onto a mobile phone (e.g. download MP3 tunes onto your mobile phone from your PC) is convenience. However, convenience is not worth all that much – price the tunes too high, and the extra convenience simply isn’t worth the money.
[Source: Vodafone]
Mobsharing versus mobile music services
October 2nd, 2005
According to a report by In-Stat, mobile music services—either in the form of downloadable music files or broadcast digital radio—have greater interest among US mobile customers than gaming, an application that is now providing some of the greatest mobile data revenue. However, the ecosystem that will permit widespread uptake of music applications is not yet mature, and shows signs of being put on hold until key issues, such as pricing, revenue sharing and Digital Rights Management (DRM), can be worked out, the high-tech market research firm says.
“The window to catch a group of wireless users we call ‘Mobile Music Intenders’ – those interested in mobile music services – may be closing soon,” says David Chamberlain, In-Stat analyst. “They’re ready to buy new handsets and they’re willing to pay extra for handsets that play music. Without available music services or handsets, carriers may miss this opportunity to grab what could end up being a very lucrative mobile music market.”
Motorola and Apple have alrady demonstrated this rather neatly with the ROKR, a much-overhyped iTunes-based music mobile phone that must take its music from a PC or Mac – not over the air. Accordingly, mobile networks miss out, as they clearly cannot charge for data they do not carry. However, this is rather immaterial as it ignores the impact of Mobsharing – letting users of such phones share music between themselves freely over a Wi-Fi connection. Unless there’s a revolution in music distribution, it’s not just the mobile operators who will miss out…
