Mobile Phones Blog

A slew of forthcoming music phones from Motorola’s MOTOROKR range will come fully loaded with digital copies of U2’s new album No Line on the Horizon, in a bid to drive sales of the new handset and to tap in to the increasingly lucrative mobile music market, which according to recent figures from Portico Research, accounted for a cool $11.7 billion of revenue in 2008.

As well as having all the tracks from No Line, the handsets will also come with a video for the lead single “Get On Your Boots” - currently not being enjoyed by YouTube viewers in the UK - wallpapers, ringtones, and an as of yet unnamed bonus track exclusive to the phones.

The phones in question are MOTOROKR EM25, EM28, EM30 and EM35 (pictured), and will only be available to customers in Latin America - for the time being at least.

Motorola have previously had success in the Latin market with their W388 and W231 handsets which came pre-loaded with music from Brazilian rockers NXZero, and with No Line already racking up 500,000 sales in the US alone within its first week, Motorola are probably on to a nice little earner here.

(more…)

Ever since the iPhone was released, every handset maker and their dog was quick to bust out a touchscreen phone with specs that were slightly better than those found on the iPhone. All and sundry were quick to claim Phone X as being the next ‘iPhone killer’. Months later, the iPhone 3G comes out, does pretty well for itself and Apple, and pics of what could be the next iPhone, leaked to the web days before the 2009’s Mobile World Congress, sends half the internet into apoplexy. However, development of what could be the first real iPhone killer - or iTunes killer at least - has come from a somewhat unexpected quarter.

Spotify has really taken off here in the UK. Today sees music writer Neil McCormick singing Spotify’s praises to the high heavens in the pages of The Telegraph, going so far as calling the cloud based music streaming service “the future of the music business,” harkening to the development of Spotify “or something very like it” for mobile devices as the final death knell of CDs, vinyls, and even iTunes.

(more…)

Following the crumb trail of the Cookie, LG’s credit crunch friendly touchscreen offering, comes the LG KP500 Cookie Pink, a new version of the phone that’s, erm, coloured pink.

This is good news for Paris Hilton, and other fans of the colour traditionally associated with the ‘fairer sex’ and all things cute and fluffy.

The LG Cookie turned several heads when it was announced last year, thanks to its attractive design, large 3″ touchscreen display, auto-rotating accelerometer, and support for a whole lotta audio and video file formats, making it the perfect choice for those who wanted to get all touchy feely with a multimedia touchscreen phone, but couldn’t justify spending a Sultan’s ransom on a fancy new bit of electronic kit to themselves.

The touchscreen fascia of the Cookie is eminently customisable; you can drag and drop a series of widgets on to the main menu screen, stuff such as a clock, calendar, and shortcuts to various features such as the music player, and commands, like Play/Pause, Skip etc.

You also get a neat little telescopic stylus with the Cookie, allowing you to tap, drag and poke at things on the screen without you getting fingerprints all over it.

Originally available in black, the Cookie now comes coated in a hue halfway between red and white, and is set for a release at the end of the month, just in time for Valentine’s Day. As well as a big old touchscreen and a fetching pink jacket, the LG Cookie also comes with Bluetooth 2.1, a 3 Megapixel camera, and 48MB of on board memory which can be bulked up to 8GB through the microSD slot.

UPDATED: Please check out the LG Cookie Pink review on our main site for more information.

High-end audio manufacturers Bang & Olufsen, who teamed up with Samsung to make the celebrated Serenata handset (and the not-so-celebrated Serene) and contribute audio components to the U600 and F400 handsets have bowed out of the mobile sector.

The Danish audio kings have ended their relationship with the Korean electronics powerhouse, meaning that no more Samsung phones or DVD players will come equipped with B&O-branded components.

Bang & Olufsen big wig Karl Kristian Hvidt Nielsen said that the decision was purely a financial one, based on the dastardly credit crunch meaning that folks no longer had as much cash to throw around for their infamously expensive equipment as they did before.

The news comes as Motorola unveiled their über-pricey AURA fashion phone, a handset which boasts an attention to detail of which the boys at B&O would be proud of. But as the world tightens its collective purse string, perhaps launching a rather expensive item isn’t such as good idea right now, especially when you plan to give thousands of your own workers the boot…

Last month, Sony Ericsson was vocally denying reports that its flagship launch this year, the Xperia X1 Windows handset, was delayed. Now, however, it admits that the product will be released as promised on September 30, but only through restricted channels in key markets like the UK. Nonetheless, the phonemaker is planning a major marketing initiative around the smartphone, as it fights for attention in the pre-Christmas buying period among other high profile new arrivals like the Nokia N96 and Samsung i850 Innov8 - even if some of its tactics look like copycats of Nokia’s N96 drive.

In the UK, O2 and Vodafone will offer the Xperia X1, which has been hotly anticipated since it was unveiled back in February, from the end of this month. Orange will also have the phone, but only through indirect channels, mainly Phones4U. T-Mobile and 3 will not have the product in Q4. Dave Hilton, marketing director for SE in the UK and Ireland, said in an interview: “As part of a plan to launch the Xperia X1 this year we had to limit the release. Come Q1, there will be resources to range it elsewhere. As it was a fairly late project, only limited networks could be involved, but it will be available to the large retailers and a small amount will go through distribution for other retailers.”

(more…)

Nokia ‘Comes With Music’ has been brewing since December and will launch in the UK first, out of any country in the world, sometime next month, - with the exclusive pre-paid deal going to Carphone Warehouse, on the impressive Nokia 5310 XpressMusic ‘Comes With Music’ edition handset.

The ‘Comes with Music’ deal means that if you pay for the phone, you get free music downloads for a year, and a choice of around 5 million tracks. Customers also get to keep the downloads they make during their first year, and can download them to a PC or a handset directly and keep them on both.

It was only last month that Nokia enticed the third major label onto the platform, when the Warner Music Group agreed to allow its music into the deal after months of haggling. Originally Time Warner was worried about its songs being swapped illegally on the Nokia Mosh social networking site. Universal and Sony-BMG have already signed with the service, back in April when it was first announced. We would expect EMI and major independent labels to fall into line shortly.

(more…)

In the consumer world of multimedia handsets, DRM or digital rights management is a dirty word. DRM is the name for the software that encrypts all the high end video that comes to a handset and stops you from using it on other devices right? Well it used to be. That may be about to change.

There are lots of things wrong with what we call “old” DRM, which was prohibitive, but still many hurdles before “new” DRM comes into play, which will protect movies from being ripped off, but will no longer stop consumers moving them easily between devices. But if reports emanating from the US this week are correct, one major step, which may make all the difference, is about to be taken.

Sony Pictures will embrace a new approach, and bring with it almost all of the Hollywood studios, and by association virtually every broadcaster and content owner. The system is being called Open Market and it is a generalized DRM framework which can both support the concept of domains and can work with multiple DRM technologies.

(more…)

‘Zune Guy’ has become 2008’s latest addition to the canon of Stupid Internet Stuff which includes Star Wars kid, Chocolate Rain, the Fail thing and Leeroy Jenkins among others.

Steven Smith, aka ‘Zune tattoo guy’ was so enamoured of Microsoft’s Zune that he decided to pledge his allegiance by having two Zune logos indelibly etched into his shoulders, along with the Zune tagline ‘Welcome to the Social’ on his back and apparently another one. We’ve not been able to get pictorial evidence of this mystery fourth tattoo, but judging from the pics of the others, we’re not sure we want to.

It turns out that Microsoft were rather pleased, if a bit bemused with all the free publicity they were getting for the Zune, and so decided to offer Smith a free trip to their campus in Redmond. Apparently Bill and the gang welched on the deal days before Smith was due to get on the plane to Washington, and then the relationship turned sour - Zune Guy has now turned his back on the Zune, and has announced that he will get his tats removed or covered up.

(more…)