News for Tuesday, 13 February 2007

Omnifone announced its online music store, known as MusicStation, dedicated to mobile phone market.
Omnifone claims to have signed partnerships with 23 mobile network operators in 40 countries. For a fixed subscription fee of 2.99€ per week, one will have access to a large catalog of musics, details are not provided yet.
Music files will be encoded in eAAC+ format and protected by DRM. Alomst all mobile phone will be compatible thank to a Symbian or java application to be installed.
This offer is not entirely limited to the mobile phone marjet, as it will also be available for Mac and PC for 3.99€ per week.
As usual with subscription offer, you do not own the music, you rent the right to listen to it. Among all online music stores, Apple and its iTunes Stores is probably the only company not offering a sunscription based system. Many analysts think that subscription-based services on PC, Mac and for portable devices are less attractive than Apple's iTunes on the long run.
One should also not forget that most mobile phone have also radio features, and there are plenty of good music stations from which you can lsiten music for free... not sure that subscription offer has much success for mobile phone than it had in the past for computers.

Adobe proves once more its interest for the Mac platform by announcing the return of Adobe Première for Mac. As with Lightroom, the new version of Première will first be available on the Mac, then on PC.
Apple and Adobe will fight for the leadership of the video- and photo-dedicated software on Mac, after dropping Mac support during years, Adobe is massively investing for making Mac applications available.
However, one should not forget that software developers will also have to adapt to the new Vista environment, so they might reallocate resources to boost some Mac application developments which were heavily delayed in the past years.

During the 3GSM show taking place in Barcelona, SanDisk unveiled a new 8GB memory module named iNAND.

Despite it extremely small size, this module includes a memory controller. SanDisk has used the Multi Level Cell technology in order to miniaturize as much as possible the size of the module by creating piles of chips.
This product is mostly dedicated to the future mobile phone generation which should incorporate larger storage capacity, mostly for their digital music player feature. It should be available for Q3 2007.

The end of the battle between Apple Corp. and Apple Inc. led many to believe that Apple could obtain an exclusivity agreement over the online sale of the Beatles' catalog.
According to the declarations of Neil Aspinall (Apple Corp) to Fox News, it won't be the case. All the music retail websites which express the wish of doing so will be able to distribute tracks from the Beatles.
Now, only the hypothetical Beatles iPod remains as a fantasy for those who would like to see Apple benefitting from the deal between both companies.

As time passes many component suppliers have a harder time keeping their mouths shut. Simple reasons: supplying Apple offers some prestige, but also a real kick to the value of the stocks of the company. This probably explains why Broadcom suggested one of their chips would be in the device.
The CEO, being careful, didn't specify which chip was used. So it could be a simple Wi-Fi/Bluetooth component, or another, more important.
Marvell has already announced that at least 3 ARM chips were used in the iPhone. Samsung and Infineon, makers of flash memory and other components, have also declared being part of the game.
If the current pace continues, the iPhone will end up needing a 4 pounds fuel cell merely to be switched on!