Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Apple, already smarting from a collaboration between music retailers such as Wal-Mart and record companies Universal and EMI undercutting iTunes prices, is now under attack in Europe from the world's largest cellphone maker Nokia launching a competitively priced online music store.
The Nokia Music Store, to be opened in Q3 2007,
will offer 192kbps WMA DRM tracks for EUR 1.00 compared to Eur 0.99 for
Apple's 128kbps DRM iTunes tracks. Perhaps more importantly, Nokia will
enable users to download tracks directly to their phones and sync them
to copies on their PCs or vice versa.
There is however a potential snag. Nokia must first nut out deals with
the major carriers who have until now presented roadblocks to music
downloads by forcing users to pay higher prices than PC downloads.
Despite this, it is more than likely that Nokia has already had
successful negotiations with major carriers given that it has
confidently announced the new service.
According to Nokia, the first handsets to be compatible with the new
service will be the Nokia N81 and Nokia N95 8GB. The launch of the
Nokia Music Store in Europe presents an interesting contrast to the
launch of iPhone in the US. One of the main enablers of an effective
mobile music download service is the availability high speed mobile
broadband networks and handsets. In Europe, 3G is now the standard,
while in the US, 3G penetration is still relatively low.
If iPhone has a weakness, it is that the initial model is not 3G and is
therefore not capable of direct music downloads. When Apple's iPod
marketing director Greg Joswiak said earlier this year that iTunes
should live on the PC not the iPhone he was obviously aware that the
current model of iPhone was simply not capable of housing a mobile
iTunes service given its limited bandwidth capabilities. However, with
Nokia launching its service, Apple may have to consider launching an
iTunes capable 3G iPhone when it goes into Europe at the end of the
year.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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