Wednesday, November 23, 2005

iTunes

I have recently joined iTunes, and I think it is a fantastic service - the best place to go to get legal music downloads, partly because there are many exclusives on the service, for example Madonna's new album is available for download complete with video for her new single, and a digital book, whereas on other download services you just get the songs. You can also download music videos, at twice the price of a song, and Podcasts for free.

If you have not got iTunes I recommend that you do. You can download it from http://www.itunes.co.uk. Not only is iTunes a good music store, but it is also a good media player for your PC, and uses Apple QuickTime to play videos. It also features a Party Shuffle mode, which plays your favourite songs in a party mix style, and can create a playlist based on what you want in it, such as 15 minutes of music by x artist

I have one gripe with this service though. I recently purchased Hung Up by Madonna, and decided that I would to have the song on my mobile phone's music player my Sony K750i can be used as an MP3 player, and take removable memory cards to boost the memory available to the phone. Unfortunately iTunes will only let you use music you have bought on an iPod, an iTunes phone or burn it to CD, which is no good for users of other digital music players or non iTunes mobile phones (many high end mobile models are coming with built in MP3 players). I think it is time that iTunes supported more digital MP3 players, as I think if they did that they could sew up the market for legal music downloads!

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Opera Mini

Recently I have found a wonderful piece of software for my mobile phone. Made by Opera Software, the people behind the Opera web browser, they have released an internet browser for Java compatible mobile phones called Opera Mini. I have been trying this software package for a few days and I must say it is excellent. It allows you to surf the internet on your mobile phone, by using a special processing system to make the pages work on a small screen. I tested the browser with the BBC News page and my GMail account, and both pages worked well.

What I also like about the browser is that can also be used to access WAP pages as well (sometimes faster than your phones built in WAP browser), and you can store bookmarks, complete with bookmark icons, just like in PC browser such as Firefox and IE, so you don't have to type in where you want to go. If the web site supports cookies then you can store usernames and passwords, making access even quicker. When Opera Mini loads it comes up with a start page that can be customised with the addition of your favourite bookmarks.

Opera have created I believe an essential tool for mobile phones, and I believe that it should be included on all Java compatible mobile phones that are released in the future as it is a very good way of accessing the internet, and when it comes to having a 3G phone, it will become an essential piece of software, as full blown websites will be able to be seen on your phone, in a quick way, making access to webmail such as Hotmail or GMail a reality for many phone users.

If you would like to try Opera Mini, go to http://my.opera.com/community/ and follow the Opera Mini download instructions from there. You will need to download the software via your phone, rather than PC.