Napster says it has an awesome new iPhone app that will let you stream music directly to your phone–just like the one Apple approved for Spotify, the superhyped service you can’t even get in the U.S. yet. But Napster says you won’t be able to use its app anytime soon, and it blames the big bad music labels.
From the “that makes sense” file: Smartphones like the iPhone and the BlackBerry now account for almost one in three phones sold in the U.S. And if they keep getting better and cheaper–remember when iPhones sold for $600?–that share is only going to increase.
BlackBerry’s new Tour has garnered fairly positive reviews from the geek press. But you know who really loves it? Oldsters in the 35-49 age bracket. Or at least that’s what a new online brand survey says.
Did you want to buy or sell a media or tech company in the last six months? Chances are you didn’t: New data from banker The Jordan, Edmiston Group say the M&A market for the first half of 2009 was nearly nonexistent, at least compared to the post-MySpace Web 2.0 heyday. One exception to the drought: A booming market for mobile companies.
I’m a Sprint customer, so the wireless company knows where I live, how to find me online, what kind of phone I have and what I spend each month. And it knows my contract expires at the end of the month. So why isn’t it trying hard to keep me from the clutches of AT&T and its iPhone?
Good news for Amazon, bad news for me: The online retail giant has created a version of its popular iPhone app for lowly Blackberry customers like myself. Jump ahead a bit and you can start to get a sense of how this might actually create a market for mobile advertising.
Give Palm credit: The handset maker, which has been struggling to figure out whether it wants to heighten expectations or dampen them, delivered third-quarter results that were just as lousy as it had promised. Palm said it lost 89 cents a share–or 86 cents a share after excluding one-time charges–on sales of $96 million, and said smartphone sales were down 72 percent. That’s what Palm meant when it warned earlier this month that revenues would be bad and that it would experience “continued margin pressure from its legacy product lines” for a while longer. But just wait till the Pre arrives!
At today’s Kindle 2.0 unveiling, CEO Jeff Bezos took pains to point out that at some time you will be able to read Kindle books on non-Kindle devices. Of course, he didn’t provide any other details. So does an iPhone tie-up make sense at some point? Or does he have something else up his sleeve?
The BlackBerry Storm hasn’t been a breakout hit. But last quarter Verizon still added another 1.4 million mobile customers, none of whom seemed swayed by the iPhone.
Palm used to own the smartphone market, but now it’s barely hanging on. Today the company unveils its long-awaited comeback plan: The Pre, which features an iPhone-like multi-touch screen but also boasts a keyboard. Will it be enough?
Apple, Research In Motion and Google are duking it out for consumers’ smartphone dollars this fall. But here’s an early winner: Time Warner’s AOL, which has landed a $1 million contract to push Google’s G1 phone for the next two days.
Wireless carrier T-Mobile, which is selling the phone in the U.S., is launching a big push on AOL’s Platform A ad network today. It has agreed to buy a billion impressions today and tomorrow.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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