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Earlier this week, electronics retailer Best Buy announced a new mobile backup service called mIQ. Designed to compete with similar services like Apple's MobileMe or Microsoft's My Phone, mIQ offers up to 1 GB of storage space in the cloud for photos, video, contact and calendar information, SMS messages, and more. However, unlike its competitors, mIQ has a couple of distinct advantages: it's 100% free and anyone can sign up to use it.

Yesterday major electronics retailer Best Buy and internet powerhouse Google announced a partnership designed to help the retailer compete in the mobile sales arena. In addition to other Best Buy strategies for ramping up their mobile division, one key aspect to their multiphase plan involves collaborating with Google on a series of exclusive mobile applications, the first one being a shopping app that helps customers find the item they're looking for within their nearest Best Buy store.

Last fall, Best Buy bought Napster for a jaw dropping $121 million, a staggering sum in the free-music era that Napster helped create. The electronics retailer thinks it can do something special with the music service though and now those plans will see the light of day.

At 5pm PST the new Napster will launch with a $5 monthly subscription plan (down from the old $15 plan) and what you get for that price looks quite good. 5 MP3 downloads per month (screenshot shows free credits for an initial 35 MP3s too), free on-demand streaming of more than 7 million songs and additional download purchases for between 69 cents and $1.29. There's a screenshot of the new interface below and our thoughts on where this new version still falls short.