Tech notes

Mar 1 2007 By Herb Kim, The Journal

The mobile phone world's movers and shakers were recently out in force at 3GSM in Barcelona to discuss industry trends and showcase the latest handsets.

User-generated content, mobile TV and location-based services all caused a buzz at the forum, but it was music on mobile phones that proved the key talking point.

On one hand, we heard from a few sources that demand for downloading music onto your mobile is fairly low, and that the user experience is so poor that it's putting people off doing it.

Even Edgar Bronfman Jr, chairman and CEO of Warner Music, quoted a survey which found that only 8.5% of people with music-enabled phones have downloaded music, and said the consumer experience is `expensive, complicated and slow'.

On the other hand, the predictions for the future of the music on mobile market were generally positive - with some suggesting mobile phones would become the most important distribution platform for music-based content.

Mr Bronfman's negative comments, for example, were part of a far more positive speech in which he also said the market had potential for `explosive growth'.

There's quite a difference between the two standpoints. So what's the truth?

In my view, one of the main barriers to music on mobile phones taking off, certainly in the big way predicted by many at 3GSM, has always been down mainly to storage problems.

First off, the memory cards available for past handsets never had enough space to store more than around 20-30 songs - hardly enough for a bona fide music player. Secondly, it was often difficult and/or inconvenient to transfer these songs to your new phone once you'd upgraded your handset.

But now these barriers seem on the verge of collapsing. Some of the models on show at 3GSM already look good enough and stylish enough to shove some MP3 players off the shelf. They now come with tiny, removable memory chips many gigabytes in size that can hold thousands of tracks - enough to rival many MP3 players, and even perhaps the iPod.

Of course, music on a mobile is about more than simply having enough space to store more tracks. What people really want is to be able to download music to their phone while they're out and about - and again, it seems it could soon happen.

On the evidence of 3GSM, there are already lots of companies lining up to offer these sorts of services, including Apple.

However big the storage capacity of new memory chips, though, and however easy and impressive the offerings for downloading music, the ultimate challenge for the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Apple is be to convince us consumers to do more than just talk and text through our mobiles. It's good to talk, But even better to listen.