If you are a big Madonna obsessive, now might be the time to switch to Vodafone as it and Warner Music International (WMI) have partnered in order to deliver seven tracks from Madonna’s new album, Hard Candy, to Vodafone customers ahead of its official release on April 28th.
As of April 21st one track will be lifted from Hard Candy every day and made available to download on Vodafone Live! for 24 hours until the full album is released seven days later.
Vodafone customers in Spain, Portugal, Germany and Belgium will also have exclusive mobile access to Madonna’s new single, ‘4 Minutes’, effective immediately. All Vodafone customers in the participating territories will have access to a Madonna mini site via Vodafone live!, packed with ringtones, ringback tones and SMS tones. No details on pricing but we are guessing that at least some of the content will be free, perfect for budding material girls and boys. Come on, you must have known that a badly shoehorned Madonna quote was coming?
One Llama Media has launched a version of its music search site for iPhone. It basically lets you tap in a band and/or song name, and be taken straight to the relevant YouTube video, as well as find similar clips.
“We have built this exciting application by integrating the One Llama music search technology with YouTube and Apple’s iPhone using their published, open APIs,” says One Llama’s director of product development Amit Sudharshan. “We have mapped our music database of over 1.4 million tracks to online music videos. Now users can not only discover new music, but also where available watch the full length video.”
The web app works well, but I’m not entirely sure why you’d use it instead of just firing up the YouTube app on your iPhone and searching for the music videos that way. Perhaps it’ll become clear over time as more features are added to the One Llama site.
One Llama website
Something I’ve been wondering ever since Apple announced its iPhone SDK was whether it’ll allow rival music stores like Amazon and eMusic to launch apps for the iPhone to sell their music. In an ideal world, Apple would welcome the competition and be confident that iTunes will be able to take them on, but something tells me it might take the alternative approach and ban them.
However, some people are working on the idea in a distinctly unofficial style. Someone’s created a native iPhone app called iPhone Music Center, which lets you browse songs from Amazon’s US-based MP3 store on your iPhone, then buy and download them. Amazon sells DRM-free MP3s, so in theory they play on the iPhone without any problems.
This is an issue to watch, since it would make sense for rival stores to try and compete with iTunes on the iPhone itself, but Apple’s policy remains to be seen.
iPhone Music Center website (via iPhone World)
Obviously feeling a little overlooked in the aftermath of Apple’s high profile SDK release, Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at Google, has been doing his best to remind everyone about a little know mobile OS called Android.
Following a presentation on Thursday at the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Miner stated that he expects Android to be more successful than the iPhone.
Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone
Miner went on to point out the significant restrictions of the iPhone SDK that will potentially limit the scope for iPhone applications.
There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can’t do with the iPhone at least at the moment
This comes on the back of Apple’s boasts of having supplied 100,000 downloads of its SDK in just four days. Google’s Android SDK has been downloaded 750,000 times which is certainly not to be sniffed at either. Either way, with Windows Mobile and Symbian also thrown into the mix, 2008-09 might set the stage for an OS showdown that makes Apple’s battle with Microsoft back in the day look like a playground scuffle.
(Via Yahoo! News)
A big announcement has come from the O2 camp today - the company has partnered with Napster to launch mobile music download service. The service will be available through O2’s O2 Active, with access to over 5 million songs. What also pretty cool is that when you buy a song over the air, you will receive simultaneous dual delivery to both your mobile phone and your PC.
The tracks will be priced at 99p each or 5 tracks for £4 which is roughly in line with what iTunes charges. Once a song is purchased on the mobile phone, a copy will be automatically sent to the email address of the customer’s choosing.
Apparently the partnership will land O2 the accolade of being the provider of the UK’s largest full track mobile music download service and will encapsulate all of the biggest new releases from the biggest names in the industry. Not so much a cautionary flirtation with a mobile music service as a full-blown assault then. Whether the service will canabalize iPhone sales for other traditionally less music focussed handset remains to be seen.
At CeBIT last week a company called Linguatec was showing of a remarkably clever piece of software for smartphones and PDAs. Dubbed Shoot and Translate, the application works by translating text that you photograph with your handset’s camera.
All you have to do is take a picture of some text (we are guessing that street signs and menus work better than novels), let the application scan the text, and then read or listen to the translation.
You can of course enter text into the phone manually too, but then the pitfalls of spelling inaccuracies and other such linguistic frippery can cause all sorts of problems. Even so, if you happen to photograph some text that is spelt incorrectly, Shoot and Translate apparently still has a good chance of recognizing what it is supposed to say before translating it.
Very handy indeed and much more portable than one of those so called pocket Spoken (insert language here) Dictionaries. Details about the release date and handset compatibility have not been announced yet so here’s hoping Linguatec posts some on its site soon.
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Thrusting the accusatory finger of justice at celebrities and calling out their less than exemplary behavior is a favorite pastime of us Brits (and humanity at large). After all, there really isn’t anything quite as exhilarating as pointing out the shortcomings of others.
Which is why we are going to have a wry little snigger at Jeremy Clarkson for getting caught chatting on his mobile while driving. A couple spotted him piloting a rather elderly Mercedes Benz (as in a classic car) while chatting merrily away on his mobile. Sensing the opportunity to make a few quid out of the red tops, the couple duly sent their evidence to a tabloid newspaper (as opposed to the police) so that the rest of the nation might join them in an outcry of indignation, upturned noses and a chorus of rebuttals to the tune of ‘he thinks he’s above the law but he’s not’ etc etc.
Using a mobile while driving is of course irresponsible and illegal, and Mr Clarkson should of course be the sort of chap to set a firm example. Police are apparently investigating the evidence and if Clarkson is found guilty he will stand to lose three license points and will be fined.
(Via BBC)
The BBC has given the mobile version of its web site a much needed overhaul. Gone is the austere minimalist design and in its place are some bright micro-graphics alongside a more modern layout. The addition of more images and a flashier design is no doubt due to the fact that the Beeb has clocked the fact that data costs aren’t such an issue these days what with unlimited tariffs becoming ever more the norm.
If you punch in www.bbc.co.uk to your smartphone’s browser, the mobile site is automatically served up but you can still access the old minimalist design by toggling it in ‘Preferences’ at the bottom of the home page. Now you have as good a reason as any to take a coffee break from whatever it is you are supposed to be doing to check it out, at least, that’s the excuse we are giving.
(Via all about symbian)
In Britain, many 18-25 year olds aren’t exactly the most responsible of borrowers and debt among young people is a serious problem. So let’s just be thankful that obtaining a loan isn’t as easy over here as it is in Sweden where all you need to do is send a text.
Yep you heard right and as you might imagine, text lending has led to some pretty serious financial woes for both banks and borrowers alike so reports the Agency France Presse (AFP). The process couldn’t be simpler, send a text message, wait 15 minutes and bang, 300 clams, bones, fahzools, euros or whatever you want to call them, land in your account.
The first text loans were issued in the middle of March 2006. Since then, the number of outstanding text message loan repayments has rocketed with debt collectors currently chasing some 20,000 text loans, 35.9 percent of which were given to people aged 18 to 25.
“There is reason to be seriously concerned about this development,” head of the Swedish Consumer Agency, Gunnar Larsson, told AFP.”
Too right there is. How are they going to pay for their phone bills?
(Via textually)
After finding out about the huge internal shifts going on at Motorola a couple of months ago which was followed by a less than inspiring MWC showing, our hopes for the fledgling handset manufacturer were not high.
Looks like we might have spoken too soon however (in our inner monologue anyway), and if Motorola is set to change into something very different from its former self, it isn’t going to do so without a fight.
The folks over at Unwired View have been carefully scrutinizing a fresh YouTube video that contains sneak peaks of various new Motorola handsets. Perhaps the most interesting of the lot is what looks like a Kodak branded phone which might be one of the first fruits of Kodak’s partnership with Motorola. Our guess on that front would be a 5 megapixel effort with flash and some robust software to back it up.
Elsewhere in the clip there are also various other handsets that the chaps at Unwired View are speculatively naming the MotoMing 2, Rokr E10 and Moto Q10 alongside something that looks like a Motorola Q9 update. We’ll wait for the official press releases before attempting a full run down but at the very least it seems that Motorola’s 2008 line–up is looking pretty robust. Apparetly the forthcoming CTIA Wireless event on April 1-3 will be where Motorola bears all. Hit the jump to watch the YouTube clip in full. Continue reading ‘What does Motorola have in store for 2008?’
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