An article today from Computerworld quotes an analyst that says Apple should be worried about the new Google Android phone and Amazon’s MP3 music service.

Apple should certainly be worried,” said Aram Sinnreich, a media analyst at Radar Research. “It’s relied on the walled-garden approach with iTunes,” he added, talking about Apple’s locking the popular iPod to iTunes. “That’s OK, as long as no one knows their butt from their elbow.”

Calling the T-Mobile-Amazon partnership “a winning combination,” Sinnreich pointed out two reasons why he’s impressed with Amazon’s music store. “It’s gotten some real market share, and it’s really been an important force in moving the industry away from DRM,” he said.

Considering Apple iTune’s has a huge percentage of the online music market, and iPod’s have a large percentage of music players, why does it have to worry about Android and Amazon?

The short answer is DRM. Amazon’s music store sells songs without copy protection, whereas Apple mostly sells music using its DRM scheme. Apparently, DRM is not as popular as it was a few years ago. Consumers aren’t interested in being locked in to one particular music security system.

Another reason why Apple should be worried is price. Amazon prices singles at $0.89 compared to iTunes, which sells all singles for $0.99. Combine no DRM and lower prices, and Amazon may eat into iTunes’ sales.

However, Apple shouldn’t worry too much in the short-term. It’s going to take something monumental to dethrone Apple iTunes, iPods and iPhones. Amazon may gain some traction in the short-term, but a larger DRM-free movement among portable music players may be necessary.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I almost love my Sprint Mogul smartphone. When I was doing research on what my next phone should be, the Mogul jumped to the top of the heap because it had great Internet connectivity (Sprint’s EVDO network) and a very good mobile browser (Mobile IE 6.0).

But there are some things that just don’t work well. One of them is the X or close button on the menu bar. By default, Windows Mobile minimizes applications when the X button is tapped. That means the application will not be closed and it will stay running in the background memory of your Windows Mobile device. If you open up too many windows, your device may start slowing down. And if that starts happening, you may need to do a soft re-boot of the phone.

Instead of dealing with this hassle, I use one of my favorite Windows Mobile applications: X-Button for Pocket PC. This tiny piece of software lets you take control over the X button so that applications really close, not stay minimized.

Finding this piece of software, isn’t very easy. You generally have to Google it to find it (Use terms like “HTC X Button” for example.) The results usually come back from online forums, (like XDA Developers.com SprintMogul.net or FreeWarePocketPC.net), where you can read postings, but have to register as a forum member in order to download any software. Here are the places where I’ve found them available:

FreeWarePocketPC: http://www.freewarepocketpc.net/get-htc-x-button-v1-50.html
XDA Developers: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=330046

I am using the 1.0 version, however, I’ve seen 1.5 and 2.0 versions available.

Although this is the software I use, there are lots of applications that can do this. Some of them are bundled with other utilities, which usually cost about $30. But X-Button is a free, small and doesn’t add anything to your menus or modify how things look. It just works.

If anyone else has their own favorite X-button software, please comment below and let me know about it.

Technorati Tags: Sprint, Mogul, smartphone, X-button, X Button, Sprint Mogul

According to Juniper Research, the worldwide mobile music market will hit $17.5 billion by 2012. Much of the growth will be by rental music services as well as downloads.

Juniper also said that Asia will be the largest marketplace for mobile music over the next five years, accounting for around 43% of sales per year. Ringtone saless, they say, will fall; they currently account for 62% of the mobile music market but by 2012, Juniper expects it to account for only 38%.

The company said that the popularity of the iPhone is pushing the mobile music business. But I wonder how many people use the iPhone as their music player. As a phone, it works well but as a music player it’s not quite a replacement for your 160GB iPod Classic. Although it does come with 8GB ($399) and 16GB ($499) versions, it can’t hold all your music. So many people will have both an iPhone and an iPod.

I would buy an iPhone tomorrow if it had at least 80GB for my music. My current phone, the Spring Mogul, also acts as a music player, but I’ve never treated it as one. I do hold a handful of songs, but it’s mostly for fun and showing off to friends and family. It only has a 512MB mini SD card, so it doesn’t hold very much. But I use my phone as a phone and Internet-enabled device. And I have a separate iPod for my music.

According to a study conducted by Ericsson and CNN, 34% of respondents ranked TV as the most in-demand application for their phones. About 44% said they are ready to adopt mobile TV in the next two years. I guess it’s time mobile operators start giving consumers what they want. Some of the current mobile TV applications out now–MobiTV, Sprint and Verizon’s VCast–leave a lot to be desired.

On my Sprint Mogul phone, I can’t receive Sprint TV at all, which is a crying shame. The Mogul is a Windows Mobile-based smartphone with EVDO and Wi-Fi connectivity. It’s an expensive phone with lots of advanced features. Yet I can’t get Sprint TV on it. Can someone please explain why this is the case? Fortunately, I can tune into videos on the mobile version of YouTube. But even then, I can’t watch just any video–they have to be popular, featured YouTube videos since they have to be converted from YouTube’s Flash-based video into something that can be viewed on my mobile phone.

I would definitely watch more TV on my phone if it was offered. Right now, my best bet is to download video onto my phone manually, store it on my phone and watch it later. That’s a slow, tedious process, when I should be able to watch streaming mobile TV right now.

Anyway, the report also said that 24% of current mobile TV users watch content daily with around half (52%) tuning in on a weekly basis. The most popular type of video was news (77%) followed by scheduled television at 48%. Among other findings were that 57% of consumers use mobile photo to send and receive images on a monthly basis, making it the most popular activity.

Technorati Tags: Ericsson, CNN, mobile TV, mobile video, Sprint TV, Sprint, Sprint Mogul, EVDO, MobiTV, YouTube, VCast

I recently bought a new phone called the HTC 6800 from Sprint. It’s a Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone, also known as the Mogul (by Sprint) and Titan by other mobile providers. Even though I’ve just had it for one month it’s already changed how I work and relax.What I love about the phone is that it’s a multimedia device. And I love multimedia. It can play MP3 and WMA music files, plus it can do some streaming media with Windows Media Mobile. It’s not a great solution (I can’t view every video on the Internet with it), it at least gives me some basic mobile streaming capabilities.

On the work side, it has a slide out keyboard for easy typing and texting and comes with Mobile Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus Adobe Reader. So theoretically, I can download any Word file and work on the go. I say theoretically because I haven’t really tried to open some of the more complex Excel or Word documents that I use in my work. But it definitely works great for most normal documents. It also comes with a voice recorder, so I can quickly record a voice memo or record a conversation quickly.

But the main reason I’m writing this post is because of the problems I’ve currently having to get my new phone to do exactly what I want it do.

Here is what I want my new Mogul to do:

Play YouTube videos in Flash format. My Mogul can stream some video with its built-in Windows Media Mobile player, but there’s a lot it can’t do. For example, I can’t just log on to YouTube with a WM6 device and watch any video. YouTube has to convert the video to a mobile-friendly format in order for it to be playable on my device. And unfortunately, YouTube takes some time to convert videos and does so for only the most popular videos. I’ve searched the Internet and found some promising leads on how to install a Flash-friendly player on my phone, but so far I haven’t gotten it to work.

One E-mail Inbox. I have lots of e-mail accounts. There are web mail accounts, POP and corporate email accounts and I don’t want to check each one individually. I don’t want to synch e-mail with my home PC and worry if a message was read or deleted off the mail server. That’s too much of a headache. I want the universal e-mail inbox, but that doesn’t really exist yet. But I have found the next big thing. Gmail! You can check POP accounts and consolidate everything into one account that I can check using my phones web browser. Plus Gmail does IMAP e-mail which automatically synchs my messages no matter if I read them on my mobile phone, desktop work PC or where ever. I’ve switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. And it rocks!

Add MMS or PictureMail. My Sprint HTC 6800 phone doesn’t have the ability to send picture mail. Isn’t that crazy? I can take photos with my phone but have to send pics via e-mail instead. So I did some research and found a program I installed that added support for MMS picture mail. The bad news? It’s clunky; I have to manually type someone’s mobile number every time I want to send picture mail. Unfortunately I don’t memorize many phone numbers anymore so this is a huge step back from my old cell phone. Why can’t Sprint add support for PictureMail on my phone? I don’t know. Other phones have it. I had to find a work-around that sorta works, but not quite the way I want it to.

Close Application Windows. Windows Mobile 6 is famous for taking up lots of memory. That means that your phone and applications can slow down considerably. Mostly, it’s because you have to shut down an application otherwise it remains in the background sucking up valuable memory. And if you remember to hit the X button on the toolbar, WM6 doesn’t really close down the application. It just closes the window. The application keeps on running in the background. So I downloaded an application, which makes the X button actually close the application, not just minimize it. As a result, my phone runs a lot better and faster.

Record Phone Calls. As a journalist and analyst, I use the phone a lot for interviews and teleconferences. I would love to be able to record a phone call with my Mogul smartphone. In fact, I even downloaded software that said it could do this. But after doing intensive searches, I discovered that most smart phones in the U.S. don’t allow phone recording because of legal issues. So I spent all that time finding software, installing it and trying to figure out why it doesn’t work. Only to find out this isn’t possible. Oh well.

Threaded Text Messaging. I do lots of text messaging so I like the iPhone’s ability to keep a chat-like record of text messages. Treos have this option too, of course, but iPhones really make it look nice. Unfortunately, my Mogul didn’t come with threaded text messaging–each text message came up as a separate message, and there was little organization. So I installed this awesome threaded messaging software on my phone, which now lets me keep track of messages in a IM-style window. And it keeps track of time and date of each message, separate by different users.

Sirius on WM6. I’m a subscriber to Sirius satellite radio, mostly because I like to listen to Howard Stern. Plus, having the option of tuning into their music stations is a great way for me to learn about new music. It’s totally replaced my terrestrial radio in my car. As a subscriber, I can log in to the Sirius.com web site and listen over the Internet. However, I’d love to be able to listen to Sirius on my phone. It has an EVDO broadband connection after all. And a pretty good browser. But trying to log-on to Sirius and listen doesn’t work. There is software written by some intrepid Sirius fans for the Windows Mobile platform, but I haven’t been able to get it to work. Guess I’ll keep hoping and searching for a solution. In the meantime, I downloaded Last.fm’s WM6 application and can listen to that while on the go.

I just hate how I have to spend so much time hunting down work-arounds and changing settings simply to get my phone to how I want it to work. I wish I could buy a phone off the shelf that could do everything I want it to do. But I guess I’ll have to piece it together myself.

Technorati Tags: Sprint, Mogul, HTC 6800, HTC, mobile video, Sirius, iPhone, MMS, YouTube, smart phone, Treo, EVDO, mobile TV