Mobile phones with built in MP3 music players are proving a massive hit with consumers, far outstripping sales of dedicated music players, say Nokia.
Speaking to Reuters, Nokia’s multimedia unit director, Tommi Mustonen, said the mobile giant aimed to shift 80 million music devices this year, getting on for double last year’s tally of 46.5 million.
“The technology is completely ready, and the change in consumers’ habits has started. The best evidence is our sales number. We are selling huge amounts,” he added.
Nokia’s sales figures certainly dwarf those of Apple, who sold 8.7 million iPods in the last quarter – a high enough figure to keep them at the top of the dedicated music player charts, but still way behind music phones.
Although two out of three consumers with suitable equipped phones are already using them to play music, Nokia insists that Apple is not a competitor (well, not until their highly anticipated iPhone hits the shops).
“The comparison with iPod is wrong; it is a single purpose device, and it is not connected,” Mustonen said, adding that he believes that Nokia’s current rivals are, “companies which make multimedia computers.”
One of their rivals is most certainly Sony Ericsson, currently the world’s fourth-largest handset maker and feeling chuffed with itself after flogging 15 million Walkman music-playing handsets in its first year.
The overall European mobile phone music download market is expanding faster than Mr Creosote at a dinner table too, with Forrester Research predicting that the market is to grow to 674 million euros ($857.5 million) in 2011.
Video howto site VideoJug has signed a deal with UK tabloid, The Sun, to provide ten video clips to them weekly.
Much of the production of the video is carried out in Spain where they aim to produce up to 500 clips per month. They are also soliciting members of the public to upload their videos to add to the pile.
Nokia is to have Mission Impossible 3 released on memory cartridge in parallel with its releases on DVD – making it the world’s first mobile premiere.
Nokia has been trying very hard to 
No it’s not the time for you to throw me a lavish surprise celebration ‘do’ (mark 9th August in your diaries for that one), it is time to tell you about the gift for those who have nearly everything … or nothing.
The intention is that this new programming will start with Birthdays and then open up into other anniversary days to help it fit its ongoing remit ‘as your big day tv’ and it’ll also put the content on the Web for further targeted enjoyment. Merry Christmas TV and Happy New Year TV are already in planning.
BirthdayTV prices start at the pretty reasonable level of £30 for 15 seconds, with a minute coming it at £100. Booking is via an online form, with video being sent in by post, at least ten days before broadcast.
BT has launched a ‘virtual vault’ offering a secure online location for broadband users to safely stash personal files.
The manager then synchronises the data with the copy stored in the Digital Vault, with no user intervention needed.
The final version of the Firefox 2.0 browser is expected to be released into the wild today.
“If your browser needs a restart or the OS asks you to reboot, losing all of those web pages and content is pretty disruptive,” commented Mozilla VP of products Christopher Beard. Ain’t that the truth, Chris!
Set for a beta launch this month, Scrybe looks to be a ground-breaking online organiser if it lives up to the claims made in the promotional video posted on YouTube.
Web snippets – complete with bookmarks, graphics and text formatting – can be copied into a categorised Thought Pad interface and integrated with calendar events and To Dos, with multi page documents browsed via a sleek, pop up graphic navigation pane.
What we think so far
Although the online demo looks amazing, we’ve seen far too many slick presentations be followed up by a hideous kludge of a program, so we’ve signed up to the beta trial and will hopefully be able to give you our hands-on verdict soon.
UK Internet shoppers are spending up to 50 per cent more on electrical goods than they would on the High Street, according to new research.
Not surprisingly, popular consumer products like hard drives and mp3 players have been big movers, but GFK also noted that consumers are increasingly shelling out for more diverse products online, such as bread makers and dishwashers.
Although it was announced as part of the forthcoming Palm Treo 680 smartphone package, Google has already made its Google Maps application available for free download.
Clicking on an icon provides more address information and a button to phone them up, as well the ability to get turn by turn driving directions to and from any given point.
Microsoft have made their latest version of their Web browser, Internet Explorer 7, available for download.
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