Ear Phones: The Mobile World’s iPod

Apple’s iPod has taken over the world and inspired many look-alike digital music players. Now, iPod’s success looks set to be replicated in the mobile world, with T-Mobile’s launch of Ear Phones. The 3G mobile phones enable T-Mobile’s customers to store and play CD-quality digital music.
Just like Apple’s digital music store iTunes, Mobile Jukebox (lauched together with the Ear Phones initiative) lets T-Mobile customers browse, download, store and play music in their phones. It’s free to sample and pre-listen to a full catalogue of ‘mobile mix tracks’ from Ear Phones’s label partners Universal Music and Sony Music.
It takes some two minutes on a 2.5G phone to download a mobile mix track from Mobile Jukebox. On 3G phones, it is around 30 seconds per mobile mix track. The cost per download track will be ?1.50 / ?1.50 – almost the same as what it costs to download digital music from your usual Internet line. The best thing is, you need not go buy a digital music player which can set you back by as much as a few hundreds dollars! With your Ear Phones, you can listen to your favourite music while on the go.
Ear Phones launches with 5 new handsets (mobile music downloads supported) at around ?29.99 / ?59.95 each for post-pay customers. By Christmas this year, there will be 12 handsets in the collection.
Looks like mobile phones will become as synonymous with music as they already are with voice!
Read: T-Mobile Press Release