Pocket Picks Big Guide To… Mobile Music

Phones are the new iPods! It’s always good to start with a vague, generalist cliche when writing about mobile music. Okay, so there’s not going to be a mountain of chucked-out iPods any time soon, but mobile handsets are better than ever when it comes to music.

You can download full tracks to your phone, watch the latest music videos, and even stream your own personalised radio station or mix up your own techno epics. To get you started, I’ve rounded up some of the key handset features, operator services, and other musical mobile goodness. And I’ll be updating this feature as new phones and services launch in the months ahead.

Music handsets

An increasing number of mobile phones are capable of playing your MP3 or WMA music files, meaning you can treat them like a mini-iPod. Although you can store music on their internal memory, most don’t have more than 64MB of space, which is enough for 15 or 16 tunes. Instead, most music-capable phones use memory cards to store the music, giving you up to 2GB of space if you shell out for a top-range card.

We’re starting to see dedicated music phones come out, in particular Sony Ericsson’s Walkman range of handsets (pictured), as well as models like the Nokia 3250. Some of these are starting to rival iPod Nanos for space, for example Nokia’s N91, which is being upgraded soon to have an 8GB hard drive to store songs.

That’s 160 albums!

How you get your music onto the phone varies between manufacturers, but it usually involves connecting it to your PC or Mac, and transferring across songs either using software from the phone maker, or an application like Windows Media Player.

Operator services

All the mobile operators offer different music services, clustered around the same basic areas of ringtones and wallpapers, full-track music downloads, and music videos and TV channels. All this content is accessed through the Music section of your operator’s portal. Ringtones are fairly standard, typically coming in polyphonic or ‘real-tone’ varieties – with the latter being the actual song snippets.

Full-track downloads are a relatively recent introduction for some operators. They involve browsing or searching through a list of artists on the portal, and then downloading tracks straight to your handset over the air. Most recently, operators like O2 and Vodafone have launched ‘dual-downloads’, which means you can get the songs on your PC too, in better quality for playing through big speakers.

Meanwhile, 3 has been selling music videos like hot cakes to its users, racking up millions of downloads in an area that wasn’t expected to be big on mobile. These work in the same way as full-tracks: you browse a list, then choose one to download over the air, when it’s stored on your handset. The other operators also offer music videos for download.

For a full guide to operator music services, click on the links below:

O2
Orange
T-Mobile
Virgin Mobile
Vodafone
3

Non-operator services

It’s not just the operators running music services, of course. You can buy ringtones and music wallpapers from hundreds of ‘off-portal’ companies, including the likes of Jamster, BoltBlue and MobMusic.

More intruiging are some of the other mobile music services out there. Take Shazam, for example, which lets you use your phone to identify music that’s playing in the real world, and then go online to buy ringtones, full tracks and related content.

Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson has just launched its M-Buzz portal, which lets you discover new bands, while Nokia will shortly launch its own Music Recommenders service, spotlighting underground music from around the globe.
Radio rocks!

One of the most underrated forms of mobile music is radio, yet new technologies are seeing it rise in prominence. An increasing number of phones have an FM radio built in, which uses your earphones as its aerial, and lets you store a certain number of stations as presets, to make it quick to switch between them. Great for listening to Chris Moyles / Lauren Laverne / The Archers on the train (delete as appropriate).

Meanwhile, Virgin Mobile has launched its Lobster 700TV handset (pictured), whose big selling point is its mobile TV channels. However, you can also use it to tune into 50 digital radio (DAB) stations too, promising better audio quality than FM, if you’re in a reception area.

Vodafone has gone even further, launching its own Radio DJ application that lets you stream a selection of custom-made radio channels over your mobile connection, or even create your own channel, rating the songs that it plays until it learns your tastes. The service works on both your PC and your phone, too.

Make your own music

If you’re a frustrated musical genius, you can use your mobile phone to make music, as well as listen to it. It’s a relatively new area, but Orange launched its Fireplayer application some time ago, which lets you mix samples to create your own music. You can download it from Orange World.

Meanwhile, an application definitely worth checking out is SSEYO miniMIXA (pictured), which lets you blend audio loops together to make songs. There are currently versions available for Windows Mobile, Nokia and Sony Ericsson smartphones.

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