Napster, the once illegal music-sharing website and now major music retailer, plans to sell downloads in the MP3 format, joining the many companies removing copying protection from online tracks.

Napster said yesterday it would start offering the format from the second quarter in a switch from using Microsoft’s digital rights management (DRM) system.

This is good news. I really do need to sit down with someone from Napster and see if their face twitches when I mention the word ‘mobile’.

I can’t believe they’re sat staring at the wall whilst everyone else on the planet is busy focusing on mobile and music.

Yes the US site has now got a few handsets compatible, but really, it’s downright ridiculous that they’re still marketing MP3 player compatibility. It’s still 1995 at Napster UK, it seems, with hardly a sausage of a mention of mobile compatibility, at all. I kid you not. Have a look and see. It’s all Creative Zens and a few age old Windows Mobile devices (”T-Mobile MDA Pro, anybody?”).

That really doesn’t cut it in today’s industry. Goodness me. I wonder what happened? Did Nokia just never return calls? Were Vodafone far too interested in the upstart, Omnifone, to bother talking with the once mighty Napster? There’s surely still a good amount of brand equity and consumer familiarity with Napster to make it worth doing a deal. I reckon many a normob (”normal mobile user”) would be delighted to see a ‘Compatible with Napster’ badge on his new Nokia, Sony Ericsson or LG.

Well I hope they continue the innovation there at Napster. Removing DRM should help boost compatibility. But it’s not just DRM removal, it’s about making the whole thing, end-to-end, work properly.

So when I buy my new [Nokia | Sony | Samsung | LG | Motorola], I can plug it into my computer and download my Napster playlists to it. Simply. Easily. No arsing about.

Or better still, I just need to type in my Napster username and password on my handset and WOOSH it’s configured and music is streaming, a la Omnifone’s MusicStation.

We shall see. Come on Napster! Come on!

I’ve used GSM phones exclusively for a long time now. I prefer GSM for the convenience of SIM cards. I can pick a phone, and as long as it’s unlocked, or locked to AT&T, I can pop my SIM card in there and go. No worries, no issues. Well, except for the iPhone.

You see, for whatever reason, Apple decided to lock the iPhone down so that you had to use an iPhone SIM card in there, even if you already had an existing AT&T account. That means when I put my AT&T SIM card in the iPhone, it said invalid SIM. I had to go through TONS of online walkthroughs and dialling secret numbers and such to ‘jailbreak’ my iPhone, and then install an application and unlock the iPhone.

I’m not worried about me. I’m seasoned with the idea of unlocking and the like, and suffered through. However, let’s take a look at the normobs getting an iPhone. Since GSM was introduced, along with SIM cards, it’s been an uphill battle to educate consumers about SIM cards, and that they can insert the card in any handset from their carrier and it would work. There’s been quite a bit of legislation and court cases recently regarding the locking/unlocking of handsets, and Nokia’s got a huge campaign going that attempts to educate consumers on unlocked handsets.

Enter Apple’s iPhone, which now says, yes, you can put a SIM card in here, but it must be the SIM card specifically FOR the iPhone, regardless of everything everyone else has been teaching you. Even an AT&T SIM card won’t work in here, you need the iPhone SIM card.

I’ve happily unlocked my iPhone, and can now use it like GSM was intended - open. But what has been done to consumers, and do you really think that Apple understands GSM fully?

Stick on the cheesy Christmas music. If you’re one of the 3 million workers in the UK that the London Telegraph reckons are planning a 2 week break over Christmas, nice one! 21 billion pounds is the calculated cost to industry for these two weeks of seasonal excitement.

Fear not. SMS Text News continues throughout the holidays. We have to do something to keep the ailing worldwide economy operational when everyone is gorging on turkey.

If you’re still hunting around for a present, might I suggest you give your loved one a big, beautiful SMS Text News Annual? Yes. Provided they’re not a normob, it’s the perfect gift. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. I’ll email your loved one to tell them the gift is on its way soon.

We’ve been working away on creating an it for some time now. Krystal’s been selecting, browsing and editing like no tomorrow on it. It contains a choice selection of posts from across the year, together with highlighted reader comments. Plus a foreword form me. A rollercoaster of a ride! All bound in attractive form replete with pictures galore. I’m really looking forward to the arrival of the first copy. You see the one problem with running a site like this is that it never stops: Time keeps marching. There are temporary lulls. But there’s no end-of-the-day ‘that was good’ or ‘hey, I’m pleased with that, let’s call it a day’. You don’t close the presses for three weeks. You go to bed, you get up and shit! You’ve got to do it all again. So there’s not that much of an opportunity to look back at particular points, posts or issues. It will be nice to have something physical to point to and flick through.

We’re using Blurb to self publish. I don’t quite know what the actual cost will be — I think around $30 plus a bit of postage or so as I’m given to understand it’s ‘coffee table size’. If you’d like one, whack me a mail. I’ll put up a few pictures of a copy when one arrives. Target publication date is first week of January. This also means I will have a book out before my friend Ilana Fox (who’s being properly published but not until February — chick lit but it does feature a reasonable amount of mobile related interaction.)

Seasons greetings to you all. If you’re bored during the next 2 weeks, check back here and drop in for a chat as we’ll be publishing daily.

By the way, if you’re somewhere snowy, do send me some pictures (that you have ideally captured on a mobile device) to make me jealous. I’ll publish them here for maximum personal annoyance. I do like to see snow outside at this time of year … although I don’t think that happens much in the Bay Area.

Link: PC Pro: News: O2 pushes email to mobiles

O2 broadband subscribers can now pick up email on their O2 mobile phones, as the operator looks at ways of converging services.
According to O2, the “Memova” technology works with any MMS-capable phone and allows subscribers to “mobilise” their O2 Broadband email accounts without having to install or configure email software on their mobile phones.

Memova also allows users to synchronise contacts, diary and task information between devices. Automatic updates are also routinely synchronised across all mobile and fixed-line services.

So if you’re an o2 fixed-line broadband customer, you can get your email on your mobile without any configuration. Smart. Obviously all they need is your mobile number to get you connected as emails are sent by MMS. And since you’re using o2 infrastructure — broadband and mobile — the cost, one imagines, for transmitting emails to picture messages on your o2 handset is next to nothing as there are no interconnect fees.

I particularly like the sound of the contacts, calendar and task synchronisation. That sounds fantastic.

Good job o2.

Ok – on the back of yesterday’s announcement of the new Mobile Pownce (http://m.pownce.com) site, I thought I’d tackle a subject this week that I (along with quite a few others I suspect) have quite strong opinions on:

The Mobile Web aka The Mobile Internet aka WAP aka the Internet, made Mobile.*

*Delete where applicable or just insert your naming convention of choice.
(We’ll come back to this one later).

Having had a rather long (read: head-bangingly frustrating) conversation with someone yesterday about how… ‘all mobile sites will become irrelevant within 12 months as the Operators all follow Vodafone’s lead, and introduce rendering engines [like Novarra], which will offer up the full internet experience to the end user’*… I thought now would be a good time to have a rant which has been boiling away inside of me since my days at Mippin.

*My reaction at this point, in case you’re interested was to walk away, screaming.

This issue is something that I absolutely, 100%, fundamentally disagree with. People (normobs — normal mobile users) do not want the internet on their mobile. They think they do.

But they don’t.

What they want is the information from the internet, optimised and perfectly formatted for their handset. They would never tell you this, because, as I said, they just don’t know.

Compressing banner ads and re-sizing images to give an out-of-context and screwed up version of the website the user is trying to view is SUCH a poor experience it’s not even worth talking about, especially when others have already hit the nail on the head so perfectly -– read more about the Vodafone contoversy in-depth here.

It’s an old story back from September but it is still relevant as shown when it came up at the recent Future of Mobile event.

To quote from Mobile Internet site creators, Wapple who, at the event, commented:

“Vodafone (and other operators) are taking a best guess at websites and dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator to fit mobile screens. They do not understand that mobile users want to interact with information in entirely different ways than they would for web.”

YES. YES. YES. The mobile internet user is, by definition, a completely different mental model to that of an internet user. The same applies to TV and Mobile TV, (which I have equally strong opinions on).

Moving on…

I am a huge evangelist of the ‘m. solution’, that is: Educating end users to drop the ‘www’ and simply insert an ‘m’ into your phone’s browser will take you to the mobile version of the site you are looking for.

Facebook has done a shed load of ground work in this area by introducing m.facebook.com to the masses. To my mind, the ‘m.’ is slowly becoming the de facto mobile website standard.

Yes there are the guys from dotmobi (*wave*) who are doing a great job (in partnership with the W3C) in introducing Best Practices for Mobile Websites and anyone developing a mobile site right now would be foolish to not look at how these guys can help - but tell me this:
On a mobile phone, what is easier to type, remember and use?
http://m.yahoo.com or http://www.yahoo.mobi?

Now, putting all that aside and going back to my opening paragraph…

Just what is the correct naming convention for what this thing is that we are accessing through our mobile browsers?

Does it depend on what we’re accessing?

‘WAP’, for me, is a meaningless acronym which brings back memories of green and black screens on phones like the Nokia 7110. But still the word is bandied about within boardrooms as if it’s still cutting edge technology.

“We need a WAP site!”
- “No. We don’t. We need a Mobile Website.”

‘WAP’, for me, is defined by the precursor wap. i.e.: wap.yahoo.com – there’s a WAP site for you. Two colours, basic text with a couple of links and that’s about it. WAP, for me, is the mobile equivalent of ‘Web 1.0’.

Internet made Mobile? See Vodafone’s poor attempts.

Failing that; for a meaningful attempt at taking internet content and making it mobile, try Mippin.

The Mobile Web? That’s where it’s at. Stick an ‘m’ in instead of the WAP or the W3 and see what you get.

If WAP is Web 1.0, then the Mobile Web is, to me, Web 2.0.

What say you?

Why? He failed to read the small print. He thought, like any normal person, that ‘unlimited internet’ meant unlimited data. It doesn’t. It means unlimited web browsing from the handset, not plugging in your mobile to your laptop and downloading TV shows from it. Oh no. Deary me.

Link: The Opinionated Normob: Worker runs up £27k mobile bill

It’s good to talk… unless you fail to read the smallprint on your new mobile phone contract and end up with a bill for £27,322.Ian Simpson, 29, was sent the bill for four weeks’ service after wiring his mobile up to a laptop to download TV shows - and only then found out his £41.50-a-month deal didn’t include unlimited web use.

Last night the factory worker, from Darlington, Yorks, said he feared he could be made bankrupt.

He said: “I just laughed out loud. How on earth could I afford to pay that?”
Ian signed up for a Vodafone Anytime 800 contract and added a £7.50 inclusive internet deal to let him use his phone for surfing the net.

Don’t worry Ian. I’m pretty confident Vodafone will come to an arrangement with you. Too may of these sorts of headlines in the mainstream media will seriously damage the UK’s adoption of data plans.

- - - -

Two weeks ago, after writing my review/rant about the N81 8GB, Stefan Constantinescu (of IntoMobile fame) left a comment:

“With the new N95 firmware out that breathes new life into the device I too can’t understand why anyone would want the N81.”

Fantastic point Stefan, the new N95 firmware does INDEED breathe new life into the N95 and anyone that comes anywhere near me with their pre-V20 firmware will get it upgraded in a flash.

What a great move by Nokia… That is, of course, if Nokia actually bothered to TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT!

Yeah yeah yeah, so Nokia told a few bloggers and released a techie press release (maybe). But fundamentally – WHO is actually going to benefit?

Ok – so as an old friend used to say – let’s do a quick fag-packet analysis:

I reckon, best guess, maybe… 5% (and that’s being EXTREMELY generous) of all N95 owners are aware that they can update the firmware (or ‘software’ as a normob may refer to it as) on their handset maybe?

Of that 5%, how many actually are going to know/check that there is a new firmware available.

You could probably argue yourself up to quite a high figure, what with the ‘firmware aware’ having a higher propensity to be techies/mobile geeks… But still.

Of THAT percentage, how many N95ers are going to risk upgrading their firmware, having had their fingers burnt in the past trying to upgrade a previous handset?

Or, what about those of us who have no intention of going anywhere near the Nokia Software Updater (NSU) after having heard such horror stories about ‘bricked’ handsets and ‘nudged USB cables’?

Right – ok – how many hands are left up? Not many.

And even you brave few who are left standing still aren’t guaranteed a new piece of firmware… because guess what?! Computer says no.

(Or in this case: Your Operator/Carrier – see some of the comments from last week’s article as a case in point).

Moving on from this – let’s take a look at the iPhone model.

The sync cradle becomes (as I heard recently) the centre of gravity for the user. They charge it, sync it and, above all, update it from one place.

The user is told, at point of sale, ‘plug this into your PC/Mac and register online’. That is the first thing the user does and immediately the user-behaviour has changed. Or has it?

How many iPhone users out there own (or have owned) an iPod? A fair few? Ok so how many of those users already associate having an Apple product that must be plugged/synced up to their Mac to optimise usage? Again – I’d bet a reasonable amount.

Apple have been very clever in a) Tapping into that pre-defined user behaviour and b) Educating the new user on how to get the most from their iPhone.

Nokia, to me at least, have a lot of catching up to do in this department. My N95 is a phone that happens to play music. The iPhone is sold as an iPod that happens to make calls.

This one simple, strategic change has resulted in a paradigm shift in how the end user benefits from updates ‘back at base’.

To put it simply: Push instead of pull.

When updating the firmware on a handset, Apple have it nailed.

Nokia we love you but, to reach the masses, you have a lot of catching up to do.

Obviously this won’t help you in the build quality or in-hand feel arena, but there’s some phones that you’d know to stay away from if you spent 4 minutes with their interface (The Samsung UpStage for Sprint immediately comes to mind). This is also really convenient for grandma (or any other less-than experience normob in your life) as they can sit online and play with the phone all they want while it’s being shipped to them.

Currently the site only offers the Apple iPhone, LG Muziq, Samsung Juke, and Blackberry Pearl, but other handsets are promised soon. Of course you can also post a review, as well as buy the phone directly through the website. Sounds like a rock solid idea, to me.

Reading in today’s issue of Herald Tribune that Nokia’s US market share has decreased from 28% in 2005 to ‘barely 10%’ today.

Not good.

A whirlwind tour around the major mobile operator stores is revealing.

Sprint: Don’t do Nokia
Verizon: No Nokia
T-Mobile: 6 models
AT&T: 5 models

Deary me.

Obviously it’s a different market place, not much in the way of phone subsidies and the like. But it’s still a huge market. Huge.

So if you’re an average consumer, a normob (”normal mobile user”) and you’d like a Nokia? Well. Stuff you. Stuff you, with bells on. You can go and buy a 400+ dollar handset at some of the Nokia stores in some of the big cities across the States… or, how would you fancy this Motorola, sir?

Gahh. I’d like to see Nokia a lot more ubiquitous across the States… I really would…

I woke up on Monday morning with the intention of writing this week’s ‘Whatley on Wednesday’ piece about firmware and firmware upgrades.
Recently a fellow Mobile Geek of London was exclaiming to me that “Nokia Rule for doing this [latest release of their firmware – V20]!”

I disagreed. The idea is great, but the application and execution leaves a lot to be desired.

We argued… and then decided it didn’t matter and discussed something else, (like whose round it was next). I left the pub with every intention to write this argument up (or at least my side of it) and post it right here for your reading (dis)pleasure. Delete where applicable.

That was until, just as I was leaving the house, I heard the latest single from UK indie group Scouting for Girls, ‘Elvis ain’t dead’. And, as with every song that you hear just before you leave the house in the morning, it became stuck in my head.

By the time I made it to the train station I had hummed the bloody thing to death and had decided that I needed this track NOW.

So I thought I’d make the most of NOW and jump onto Vodafone’s new Music Station service.

Awesome, not only will I get the track I want but I’ll also make notes throughout and then I can write it up as a review the service for SMS Text News. Score!

This – rather oddly – all happened before Monday’s Unlimited Drinks and also before yesterdays Omnifone stories that Ewan ran… Hmm… Telepathy’s working then.
But alas, Vodafone were not going to make it easy for me.

I arrived at the Vodafone Live! music page and I’m asked to download and install the Music Station Application (I had no idea it was an app?!).

Not a problem, I thought, I’ve done this before. I wonder how good their user education/hand holding is. To their merit, it’s not too bad at all. I think any average normob could find their way through this process. Well. Right up until they hit this point:

Rubbish. I tried again: Same problem.

This is becoming annoying. I turn the phone off, turn it back on again, try again and…. STILL the same problem!

I hit 191 on my phone and call customer service. After a little explaining I eventually get passed through to the technical dept…

“Hello Mr Whatley, what error do you have?”

“It says here: ‘Certificate error, contact the application vendor’.”

“Is there an error code?”

“No, it’s a certificate error… No number. I have a screenshot that I can email over if that helps?”

“Er…(small amount of confusion at this point on my keenness to help maybe?) No sorry. We’re not actually allowed to give out our email addresses.”

“Okaaaaaaaay…”

“Can I call you back on a different line?”

So I say yes, and they do. And lo and behold I’m requested to repeat the process (obviously my word isn’t good enough) and guess what? Same error.

THEN I was asked to do something, and I must state that VF UK have NEVER EVER asked me to check this in the history of being a VF customer, they asked me to check my firmware!

To the layman – this is the software version that your phone is running. Same thing on every Nokia, got an N95? Try it now. *#0000# - anything below V20 means you really should think about upgrading.
(Benefits here.)

Anyway – ‘Sam’ (I think that was her name) informs me that my current firmware, (V20, obviously) is the problem as “the Music Station is only compatible with Vodafone branded firmware versions 10b and 10c”.

Let’s just pause and take that it in for a moment.

That’s right. Vodafone’s flagship ‘Hero’ service, The MUSIC STATION, the big one they’re pushing this Christmas does not work with the latest Nokia N95 firmware.

“Sorry Mr Whatley, you’re going to have to go back to version 10.”

“That is not going to happen.”

Thinking on this now, a few hours after the event, when I originally got the handset from Vodafone it was running V11. I didn’t even know VF had V10. On top of that – I didn’t know you could go backwards with firmware either! That’s a new one on me.

VFUK suck for not making sure their leading application is compatible with the latest Nokia firmware.

So I’m sorry folks – no MusicStation review from me today. I do have a MusicStation handset but alas the generic Nokia firmware that I’m running is not compatible with the service.

Doh.

EDIT: I met Terence Eden of Vodafone at the Unlimited Drinks on Monday. He explained to me that the Vodafone MusicStation is only compatible with Vodafone’s own firmware. He also assured me that the MusicStation does work above V10 as he has seen it working on (Voda’s own variants of) V11 and V12.

Terence’s defence was that I should not have changed my firmware from VF’s to Nokia’s Generic.

Thinking on this now – that’s not a bad argument - anyone who knows me knows how much I like to hack… ahem… augment my phones so I can the optimum functionality out of them.
Well. It’s not a bad argument when you consider someone who might not buy their handset directly from Vodafone. Whose firmware is already generic upon purchase, what about them?

Next week: That rant on firmware and firmware upgrades, (the one I wanted to write this week).