• Limited choice of mobile phones. I chose the BlackBerry, because I'm used to it. No, T-Mobile doesn't offer the iPhone!
• Wi-Fi phone and data on your mobile. This is the interesting bit. Basically, wherever you have Wi-Fi, you will have free minutes.
• GPRS, which is what you would use if you don't have access to Wi-Fi.
• Wi-Fi land line. This looks like an ordinary phone but connects to your high-speed line as a VoIP phone. Other companies offer this, but getting the whole bundle from your cell phone provider is pretty cool.

My Experience

First, no disclosure needed. I bought this at a regular T-Mobile store and paid the regular listed price. This was not a journalism assignment.

Here are the key points:

• I've reduced my cell phone minutes dramatically... as in, cut them in half.
• Most of my calls are from the office, home and other locations that I visit regularly. The phone picks those up regularly. For example, when I get home, the phone says "Home" (it says "T-Mobile" when I am in cell phone mode). That's it. Nothing else to do. Just make (free) calls.
• Call quality is mostly fine. If you see three Wi-Fi bars or fewer, it's a bit flaky. You'll hear voices in slow motion, like a tape winding doooown.
• Push email comes through fine. This matters for when you are out of the country. You will still get email without having to sign up for an expensive international plan. You are not 100% always on, as you are with GPRS, but for many people who travel, it's good enough. If not, just pay for the international plan.
• It's amazing how many places I found in my test across Switzerland, France, and America that have open Wi-Fi access. I just hit "Scan for networks" on my BlackBerry, and there they are. Note: I'm writing this in Herald Square, New York City, with three open Wi-Fi bars on my BlackBerry. Hm, who shall I call?

Industry Implications

• The implications are practical mainstream stuff and carry a very simple message for consumers: save money.
• It shows that big companies can innovate and are not always afraid to disrupt their own cash cows in their quest for more market share. Kudos to T-Mobile.
• This will make Apple even keener to dump AT&T as soon as possible.
• This puts pressure on Skype to deliver a practical, simple device for mobile phones.

Your Cell Phone, Online

Thanks to its latest updates, Skydeck not only lets you access and respond to all your text messages and voicemails, but also lets you sync the contact data on your cell phone to the web. Skydeck's interface is similar to a standard email interface, with your messages displayed in chronological order, no matter if they were calls, text messages, or voicemails. At regular intervals, Skydeck syncs up with your cell phone accounts and downloads the relevant information to its servers.

BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile

All of this this, however, works best on Blackberry and Android phones, with full support for Windows Mobile coming soon (the basic features work on any phone, however). So far, there is no word about support for the iPhone.

Make Calls From the Web

Skydeck's most interesting new feature is probably its ability to make calls right from the web browser. Unlike similar solutions like Google's GrandCentral, Skydeck doesn't give you a new phone number, which means that your own cell phone number will appear on the caller ID.

Skydeck also integrates with Plaxo, so that you can easily sync your address book between the two applications.

Plans

Skydeck has three monthly plans. The free demo account lets you manage your contacts, and access your basic call data, but you won't be able to make calls, access your voicemail, or get transcriptions of your voicemail. For $9.95 a month, you get all of these features, but you pay 3 cents per minute for every call within the U.S. and voicemail transcriptions cost 20 cents each. Skydeck's unlimited plan, with unlimited calling and as many voicemail transcriptions as you could ever want, will set you back $29.95 per month.

Verdict

Skydeck is simply an incredibly useful service. It has far more features than we could even touch upon in this review (like organizing your contacts by how often you call them). In many ways, it is providing a service for your cell phone that we would have hoped to see from Google's GrandCentral.

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

The VMware MVP is software that can be embedded on a mobile phone to provide the platform for running a virtualized mobile OS and its accompanying applications. VMware claims that this software would run efficiently even on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained phones.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper-proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized," she says.

Of course the unanswered question here is the one everyone wants to know: will VMware's MVP run as an iPhone app?

We may be jumping the gun a bit in saying that there's the possibility of video upload to YouTube just around the corner for Android - the roadmap does not specify this. There's a vague reference to "video intent," but no mention of YouTube or any other video sharing web sites. Still, we can't help but hope for that feature, as it would make the Android OS an even more compelling choice for those of us who want a more open smartphone.

Upcoming Features

The "Cupcake" update does include some other features we can get excited about though, including:

• Copy and Paste will come to the web browser in addition to its new WebKit rendering engine
• Inline search will help you find text on the web page you're viewing
• A port of the "SquirrelFish"Javascript engine from Google's Chrome browser
• Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) profile support and  Bluetooth Remote Control (AVRCP) support
• Support for 3rd parties to make their own onscreen keyboards

There is no doubt that the iPhone led to a trickle-down effect that influenced nearly every aspect of both handset development and the mobile web itself. Every manufacturer is looking for an "iPhone killer," everyone is dong an app store, and web sites themselves are becoming iPhone-friendly. Meanwhile, mobile app developers are reaping the rewards of having a new platform on which they can develop.

This is the fifth in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

With the above thoughts in mind, as we look back at the best mobile apps from 2008, we can't help but notice how iPhone apps top the list. Still, we've tried to include apps here that aren't iPhone-only so that we can deliver a truly well-rounded list. If we missed your favorite app (and surely we did - these lists are always subjective), let us know in the comments. Also, please note that we chose not to include games on this list - at this point, that's a whole other category.

1. Twitter

Without a doubt, Twitter is one of the best social networks to use on your mobile device. You can update your status, send replies, and engage in 140-character conversations from the palm of your hand by way of any number of mobile applications or even via SMS (in some countries, that is). However, it's hard to pick a clear winner in the category of best mobile Twitter application. Depending on your platform, there are multiple apps available and everyone has their own personal favorite.

In an informal poll on Twitter and FriendFeed, we saw some applications received more votes than others. Those included Twitterberry, which is the Twitter app for Blackberry it seems, and Tiny Twitter was popular among Windows Mobile users. For the iPhone, things were more complicated. There are several different applications available, but we noticed that TwitterFon and Tweetie got the most votes. Plus, the newer app Tweetsville is worth mentioning, too, as it has been getting a lot of buzz lately.

Earlier this year, we had polled the blogosphere on the same subject and found then that the top mobile app for Twitter was Hahlo. Only a few months later, and so much has changed. It seems that as new Twitter apps are released, mobile Twitter users rush to try them and often end up with a new favorite du jour. What ends up being your favorite app in the long run has a lot to do with personal preference as well as how you user Twitter. Power users may find the apps with more features to be the best, while casual users might prefer a more simplified interface. In the end, what's most telling about this trend to tweet from our mobiles is that it's not about one particular application. Instead, what's important is that nearly everyone is tweeting. That makes Twitter itself the mobile winner, no matter which application you use to interact with it.

Read some of our top Twitter articles from this past year:

How We Use Twitter for Journalism 

The Rise of Twitter as a Platform for Serious Discourse

How To Get Customer Service Via Twitter

2. FFtoGo

Let's face it, we're social media addicts, and this year, no other social network has been discussed quite as much as FriendFeed. Initially, there was concern that FriendFeed was relocating the conversations that used to take place on blogs and moving them elsewhere. The conversation has left the blogosphere, we cried. Not only that, but FriendFeed's stream of updates began to overwhelm even the best of us. It just became so noisy that the service began to lose its original luster after a while. But then things started to change. FriendFeed implemented dupe detection and bloggers (like us!) found ways to integrate it with their commenting mechanisms. When FriendFeed implemented lists in late August, we were sold. FriendFeed finally became more manageable and thus, more fun.

Of course, we didn't want to give up FriendFeed just because we were going to be away from our computers. That's where the mobile application FriendFeedToGo came in. Thanks to developer Benjamin Golub, we were given FFtoGo.com, a mobile interface for FriendFeed that soon became the interface of choice, even over the company's own iPhone version. Needless to say, those at FriendFeed knew a good thing when they saw one and soon swooped up Benjamin to join the rest of the FriendFeeders in downtown Mountain View, California. We couldn't have been more pleased.

3. Google Maps

What's one of the most important applications you need on a mobile phone? Maps! And when it comes down to it, the application of choice is Google Maps. This year, we saw Google launch their own mobile OS, code-named Android, and with it came one of the coolest applications we had yet seen: Google Maps with Street View for Mobile.

In September, Google updated their Google Maps for Mobile application, which brought Street View to non-Android phones including Blackberry and those phones powered by Java. There was only one glaring omission: the iPhone. Thankfully, iPhone owners finally received Street View, too, with the iPhone 2.2. firmware update, released in November. Google also released a mobile app with voice recognition that same month. These developments came much to the relief of iPhone users who had previously worried that Google was going to only release their coolest apps for Android. Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

4. Fring

The popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring lets you access and interact with your social networks on the go, make free calls, and chat with your friends over IM - what more could you want in a mobile app? The service supports Skype, Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger), Google Talk, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!, and AIM, and all are made available over your phone's internet connection. With the Fring app, you can see who's online, have multiple conversations at once, and even send and receive files with your friends

Fring also launched an Application Programming Interface (API) earlier this year that offers the Fring mobile interface, IM, presence indication, file transfer and other features to developers seeking to build apps in standard server-side languages. Thanks to the fringAPI™, you can access an ever-expanding group of Fring add-ons including ones for Facebook, Gmail Notifier, Vtap Video Streaming, Orkut's Social Network, Yandex Push Email, and more.

Fring has long been a favorite app for iPhone - it was one of the top apps for jailbroken phones prior to the launch of the iPhone SDK. Strangely, though, there was a long delay between the July 11th opening of the iPhone app store and the October 2008 launch of the official Fring iPhone app.

It's also worth noting that Fring isn't an iPhone-only application - it's supported on a large number of handsets from many different carriers. To see if yours is supported go to m.fring.com.

5. Brightkite

Yes, the mobile social network Brightkite includes an iPhone app, but it's much more than a toy for the exclusive club of iPhone owners. The service, a device agnostic, SMS-based application, lets you "check in" at various locations out in the real world and then see who else is there, has been there, and who is nearby. You can check in via text, web,or iPhone, but text is easiest if you're using a traditional cell phone.

After checking in, you can post updates in a Twitter-like fashion and upload photos to your Brightkite-enabled stream, available at a URL in the format of brightkite.com/people/username. The newly launched "Wall" feature makes Brightkite ideal for conferences and live events as it allows anyone to display the live stream of notes, photos, and checkins at any one place in a large, full screen view that can be shown on any monitor, projector, or TV.

Brightkite isn't on this list because it's hugely successful in terms of numbers - it's here because of its potential. There's still some debate as to whether consumers really want new and separate social networks just for the mobile phone. As we noted back in October, no other social network, including those specialized for mobile devices, had even reached 15% adoption. That means Brightkite and others like it still have a way to go before they become a solid part of the new mobile web. However, if any of these apps have a chance for success, it's Brightkite. With the service's Twitter integration and live event niche, they offer something unique.

Brightkite's best competition comes from a similar app called Loopt, also a cross-platform tool. Loopt is popular with iPhone users - it made the list of top iPhone apps this year. We think Loopt's Android version is interesting, too, because it works in the background automatically checking you in as you travel from place to place. However, although Loopt is available on numerous phones and carriers in the U.S., Brightkite works on all phones. Also, whether people want an app with more automated tracking (like Loopt) or more control (like Brightkite) is yet to be seen.

As with any new application, Brightkite is still waiting to achieve critical mass. It's not mainstream yet, but it's definitely worth watching in 2009.

6. Pandora

There are a number of apps for streaming radio from your phone, but Pandora is definitely one of the best. The app is based on the Music Genome Project, an effort to categorize and analyze the details about each song in existence - including its melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics, etc. - in order to help you find more songs that are like the music you like. To do this, you just listen to some music using Pandora and rate your preferences. Pandora then suggests more songs you might enjoy. If you have diverse tastes, you can even create different Pandora channels - like one for upbeat hip-hop songs and one for your love of classical piano, for example.

Pandora's mobile application works on a number of different handsets from both Sprint and AT&T, including, of course, the iPhone.

7. Shazam

We have to give a shout-out to one other music-based application in addition to Pandora: Shazam. This clever mobile application helps you identify the song you're hearing by having you hold up the phone to the source of the music, most often the radio. The app then "listens" to the song and identifies it for you. Shazam is available both on iPhone and Android, as well as other handsets if you happen to live in the UK.

You may be surprised to learn that Shazam wasn't the first application that could identify songs from your phone. Gracenote's MusicID technology has been around for ages, but it didn't have the easy-to-use UI of the Shazam iPhone application. That simplicity combined with the popularity of the iPhone in general, makes Shazam an app worthy of a download...and worthy of its own iPhone commercial, too, it seems.

8. Opera Mini/Mobile

The popular mobile browser from Opera is always one to watch. Having launched a software developers kit (SDK) for widgets this year, there's a chance for this mobile browser to take on the powerhouse that is the iPhone through its freely developed and distributed widgets that run within the company's mobile browser on any number of handsets.

The company is already far ahead of rival Mozilla Firefox, whose mobile browser code-named Fennec is still under development. Meanwhile, Opera's mobile browser is already being shipped on millions of handsets from major mobile manufacturers including HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and more. The browser is also available for different types of mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Linux, making it the alternative browser of choice for many handset owners.

There are actually two mobile version of Opera - Opera Mobile for smartphones and Opera Mini for everything else. It's great that even low-end phones, which are all some folks can afford, can now include a better browser thanks to Opera Mini. Meanwhile, with Opera Mobile's features like offline browsing, built-in productivity tools, tabbed browsing, and the above-mentioned widgets, the next-gen mobile web experience is available to a wide range of devices.

However, one place you won't see Opera anytime soon is the iPhone. Although there was some buzz about an Opera iPhone app, if one even exists, it does so in violation of the SDK and would never get app store approval. Widgets would also make it somewhat of a competitor to the App Store itself, and that usually means a reject notice, if history tells us anything. If you ever see Opera on the iPhone, it will most likely be a jailbroken phone. We would still like to see that!

Read More Opera Coverage:

Opera Mobile News (mobile browser for smartphones): Opera Mobile 9.5 Unveiled

Opera Mini News (Opera mobile browser): coverage of both the Opera 4.1 and 4.2 releases

9. NYTimes iPhone App

For mobile news on the go, we're big fans of what the New York Times has done with their iPhone application. This is a great example of what the newspapers of tomorrow can and should look like, if you ask us. You can view the most popular stories of the day or flip through the various sections of the paper with a flip of your finger. Articles are accompanied by full-color photos, too.

Although there are other mobile news applications out there, we've been excited all year about the initiatives that the Times is taking in attempt to stay relevant in today's digital age. For example, in October, the company launched their first API, making them a news broker just as much as they are a newspaper. More recently, they opened up their front page to outside content, an effort that helps blur the lines between news and blogs even further. We think that NY Times sets a great example for other old media companies trying to embrace the internet age...we only hope that it's not too late.

Disclosure: RWW is syndicated by the New York Times.

10. i.TV

The i.TV iPhone/iPod Touch application, lets you view the latest TV and movie schedules from your area right on your mobile device. You can also rate shows, leave reviews, and recommend shows to others. The app was ranked as one of the top apps in the iTunes App Store 2008 list, too, coming in a #3 on the list of free entertainment applications.

i.TV just keeps improving, too. Last month, they added Netflix to the app, which lets you search the Netflix database, manage your queue, and add movies and shows to your instant watch queue for instant streaming on your Windows PC, Xbox 360, Roku box, TiVo® Series3, TiVo HD, or TiVo HD XL digital video recorders and select Blu-Ray players. They also integrated with Wikipedia in order to link to articles about shows, movies, and actors within i.TV. Best of all, it's free.

This app is one of the only ones we listed that's iPhone/iPod Touch-only, but it was worth including because of its simple, straightforward nature and the useful service it provides. i.TV appeals to everyone - even mainstream users, which is probably what makes it so popular. We agree it deserves the success it has received. i.TV has rapidly become one of our most-used apps this year, even worthy of placement on our iPhone's homescreen.

What do you think?

It was certainly hard to narrow down all the mobile web products to just ten, but we hope we provided you with a list of apps that were especially noteworthy this past year. (You can see more of our favorite apps here.) If you think your favorite apps were slighted, please share in the comments. Also, remember we didn't even touch on mobile gaming apps - that's really a different category at this point - but feel free to share those, too.

Best of Both Worlds?

What's most appealing about the Kogan Agora, at least based on these specs, is its promise to deliver the "best of both worlds." It combines the apps and music of the iPhone with the form factor and keypad of Blackberry. 

As much as some people love the iPhone, it's touch keyboard takes some getting used to. Some people never really get used to it - especially former Blackberry users or those who are comfortable with a two-hand typing experience. Switching to the iPhone is a move these folks need to think carefully about. Although they gain a combo media player/phone and applications galore at their fingertips, they have to sacrifice the typing experience they consider to be ideal. For heavy email users and texters, giving up the keyboard may be a deal-breaker.

Then along came Google's Android OS. Now you can have both music and apps and the possibility of using a real hardware-based keyboard. Unfortunately for Blackberry addicts, it first arrived on T-Mobile's G1 which came with a slideout keyboard. That was close, but it was hardly a recreation of the Blackberry experience.

The Kogan Agora, on the other hand, looks like the Blackberry (or perhaps the Blackjack) and includes all the Android goodness, too. Will this be the ideal combo? A Blackberry-esque media player that you can fill with downloadable apps? We'll have to wait and see once the phone arrives and reviews come in, but it definitely looks promising.

The phone will also be able to make use of Nokia's updated mapping product, which will feature 3D landmarks and, according to Nokia, is more versatile than Google Maps. These new maps themselves pose a major challenge to Google, as Nokia will, at some point in the near future, allow users to point their phones at a building and get relevant information (and presumably advertising) about that building on their phone.

Interface

Of course, the iPhone's real advantage (as well as that of any Android phone) was never its hardware, but its operating system and the overall elegance of its user interface. It is hard to say where the N97 falls here based on the videos we have seen so far. Earlier Nokia N-series phones also featured extremely capable hardware, but the operating system made it extremely hard to make good use of these features. In terms of software, Nokia does have one ace up its sleeve, and that is the N97's ability to play Flash videos and games. The OS also supports copy and paste, which is still sorely missing on the iPhone.

Widgets

The main feature of the phone's touch-enhanced Symbian OS is its support for widgets, which will be open for third-party developers and are available for download through an application on the phone itself. Nokia calls the N97 a 'mobile computer,' and a lot of its success will surely depend on the applications that third-party developers will develop for the phone. Apple's App store already features over 10,000 native applications, so Nokia definitely has to play catch-up here.

We have to say that the phone's hardware and user interface look extremely slick. Of course, we haven't been able to get our hands on one yet, and the demo video is nice, but as we know from Apple's ads, these videos can be quite deceptive as well.

Overall, the N97 looks like a formidable challenger (especially with regards to its hardware specs), but much of its success will depend on the quality and ease of use of its user interface.

According to AdAge, the advertising campaign, including radio and outdoor media, will launch tomorrow in 10 U.S. cities. Earlier this year that campaign was going to include a major car manufacturer and several well-known luxury brands, but due to the weakening economy, many of the early participants were forced to pull out as budgets were slashed. Tomorrow's launch will now just include McDonald's, Finish Line, and RedTag.

Mobile Tuesday's promotion will also have an online presence at a yet-to-be revealed URL. However, some 18,000 crafty shoppers have discovered the link thanks to sites posting Black Friday deals. Mobigosee already considers the campaign a success as they have surpassed their original goal of 5,000 and the campaign has not even officially begun.

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper-proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president, at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized," she says.

Of course the unanswered question here is the one everyone wants to know: will VMware's MVP run as an iPhone app?

Validas is ideal for the SMB (Small Medium Business) market. That includes all the bootstrapping Gritty Entrepreneurs as well as the VC funded start-ups that just got the "cut costs" memo from their pals at the VC fund. But it is also the 27 million Small Medium Businesses that employ 50% of Americans.

Validas can be used by a consumer. But an individual can probably spend a few minutes and figure it out themselves.

Nor is Validas ideal for Fortune 500. They can get the data from the carriers in a form that they can analyze any way they want, they can employ people to haggle with the carriers and have the clout to get results.

What if you are the CEO with 20 employees? You have other priorities. You can tell your Admin/Finance person to do it, but maybe his priority should be chasing receivables? You can tell all 20 of your people to figure out how to reduce all their cell phone bills? Well, if you are the kind of CEO that sprays employees with constant priorities that all get ignored, you could employ consultants to do it, but their fees might outweigh the savings.

Automating A Small Boring Job

Validas does what you would do if you took the trouble or if you employed somebody to do it. They just automate it, so they can do it fast and efficiently and thus make money in the process.

This is boring and it is small. So it should be really easy. It should fit into that quadrant that is Minor Impact/Easy To Do.

That is easy to say, but hard to pull off. Validas has the experience to deliver this. The founders, Tom Pepe and Todd Dunphy, left their safe jobs at Verizon Wireless to start Validas. They know all the tricks that carriers use to get those extra fees.

How It Works

To use Validas, you will need to be set up for online billing. Online billing is free from your carrier and you do not need to cancel your paper bill to use Validas. You can use Validas for bills from: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular.

Then you upload to Validas and view your potential savings. You can download this information into Excel or print out the reports.

Validas claims that the Current Average Yearly Savings Per Customer = $505. Presumably that is not per user and is for a small business of some type.

Validas pricing is simple, with various plans. The one they promote as best value costs $24 for 24 reports, audited every month. So that would work for a 24 person company. You can test it out with a $5 One Time Audit.

Validas fits the trend we are seeing of a return to simple "every day low prices" rather than fancy Freemium models supported by advertising. If it has value, charge for it.

The End Of Information Asymmetry

Validas looks like it is part of a big trend towards transparency, the end of "information asymmetry" that we noted in our Ten Trends To Bet On For Your Most Audacious Start-Up. We have seen start-ups doing this well in the car market. We suspect we will see more in financial services. In all cases, the start-up takes the side of the small buyer to get better deals from a large seller. Validas is a welcome entrant in the cell phone market.

Interestingly, over 20% of all subscribers also watched full-length TV shows and movies on their mobile devices. Typically, the assumption has been that users are only interested in relatively short video clips. However, judging from this data, there is clearly a market for long-form video on mobile devices as well.

Niche Market - But Popular with Advertisers

It should be noted that the overall market penetration for mobile video is still under 3%. In contrast, almost 15% of mobile subscribers use their phones to access their work or personal email, while just over 26% used them to send photos or videos to their friends. However, Comscore also points out that the mobile video audience is mostly comprised of males between 18 and 34 years old, a market segment that is highly attractive to advertisers and increasingly hard to reach through traditional advertising channels.

Along with the phone, Nokia also detailed plans for their new "Comes With Music" service, a 12-month subscription service which offers unlimited downloads. There's no charge to download the individual tracks because the cost for the music is bundled into the cost of the phone. [Note: this post has been updated throughout the day as news has come in]

Nokia isn't the only company with a subscription music service,  but theirs will be the first to let customers keep all the music that they download after the 12-months of the Comes With Music service expires. This is much different than other music subscriptions services, like Napster, for example, where you lose access to your music as soon as you stop paying. Although the tracks will be wrapped in DRM and tied to the handset and to a PC, they will be permanently owned by the customer. Other companies planning similar services include Sony Ericsson who recently announced PlayNow plus (PNP) and Korea's LG Electronics.

Nokia's other "Comes With Music" phone, this new one should be much better:

With 2 million tracks available, the "Comes With Music" service is no small offering, and considering the touchscreen device it's being paired with it's clear that Nokia is prepared to do battle with other smartphones. Whereas before Nokia only competed with conventional cell phone makers like Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics, and Sony Ericsson, they're now going up against big competitors like Apple, Google, and Research in Motion (RIM), companies who are driving forward adoption of mobile internet. "Suddenly you have the mightiest companies in the world there as your competitors. That is a little mind-boggling," said Nokia President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

Making Mobile Music Happen Isn't Easy

To get to the point of being able to offer music on a mobile device, bundled into the cost of the phone, Nokia had to collaborate with both the slow-to-adapt music industry, who worry that mobile music offerings will cannibalize existing music spending (see chart below). Also a concern is the fact that, in many cases, consumers aren't willing to pay more for a mobile phone or contract just to get unlimited downloads. For example, a recent study by Jupiter Research found that only 5% of Europeans would choose to pay more for the service, a figure that speaks to the perceived value of subsidized services - and perhaps, the value of music in general. On the bright side, though, analysts at TNS Technology said that the launch of "all-you-can-eat" music downloads would reduce illegal file-sharing of songs. This is backed up by Jupiter Research, who found that half of the interested customers in this technology claim to be file-sharers.

Credit: Jupiter Research; Click to see bigger

Here in the U.S. there are more people interested in a "Comes With Music" type phone than a subscription music service. 13% would choose an affordably-priced $150 handset and only 6% would go for a $15/month subscription service.

Fighting Apple Means More Than Music

Nokia CEO Kallasvuo specifically singled out Apple as one of the mobile industry's main players, saying "We have a new, credible competitor in this business. You know I need to take my hat off. Of course we need to be able to respond to any competitor and we will." With the launch of the new phones and music service, Nokia thinks they have something that can threaten iTunes because they believe that ultimately, price and selection will win out over brand identity.

The Apple iPhone is far more than just a simple music/phone pairing. It's the App Store that makes Apple's offering so unique. Even Google new Android OS (now available on the T-Mobile G1) knew they had to build an App Store of their own in order to have any chance against the iPhone.

While overall, the Nokia phone has a more appealing form factor than the G1, there are other areas of concern is in its design. Where Apple has mastered simplicity and ease-of-use with their interface, the Nokia phone runs the Symbian platform, something many potential customers will be unfamiliar with.

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We've now received official word from Nokia on what was announced today. Details are below.

Key Features of the 5800 XpressMusic Device

• Contacts Bar -Person centric user interface with visualized contacts makes it easy to share media and communicate with your friends
• Media Bar -Always an easy access to your favorite media•Industry leading high resolution 3.2 inch display
• Stereo speakers with surround sound
• Stylus and finger touch support for text input and user interface control
• Powerful connections with 3G, HSDPA and WLAN
• Key device in the upcoming Comes with Music service offering
• 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeissoptics and dual-LED flash. Front camera for video calls
• Built-in A-GPS and Nokia Maps and voice guided navigation•Responsive touch screen with tactile feedback
• Proximity sensor for preventing inadvertent touches and for saving power
• nHDwidescreen quality video playback
• Storage for up to 12, 000 songs with optional 16GB microSD cardPlanned

Music Synchronization

• Nokia Music Store
• Nokia OviSuite
• Nokia Music PC client
• Nokia PC Suite
• Windows Media Player 11 Inbox
• Nokia 5800 Xpress

More Info

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic introduces the 'Media Bar', a drop-down menu that gives you access to music and entertainment, like favorite tracks, videos and photos. The Media Bar also offers a direct link to the web and to online sharing. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic supports Flash content, which means you can search "the entire web," according to the company. In addition, the phone includes a graphic equalizer, 8GB memory for up to 6000 tracks, support for all main digital music formats, a 3.5mm jack, and built-in surround sound stereo speakers. Tracks are purchased from the Nokia Music Store and the newly updated Nokia Music PC software lets you drag-and-drop songs from PC to phone.

The Comes With Music service will, as speculated before, offer one year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalog and customers can keep all the music that they download. Comes With Music will be available on the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the Nokia N95 8GB, and Nokia 5310 XpressMusic. The participating labels include Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI.

Images

See a slideshow with images of the new phone:

While having random ads inserted into their messages might not work for some developers, having access to a free SMS gateway is a very seductive proposition, especially for small developers who don't have the resources to either establish relationships with the big mobile carriers, or who simply don't have the money to pay a commercial provider for access to their SMS gateway.

We asked Zeep Mobile if it had any plans to share revenue from these SMS ads with developers or if it was going to give developers any influence over which ads it would display. However, as of now, Zeep Mobile is not planning anything in this direction, though it would seem reasonable to assume that they might start sharing revenue with developers at some point in the future.

API

Besides the standard web API, Zeep Mobile has also developed Python and Ruby libraries, which developers can use free of charge. As far as we can see, this API is pretty straightforward and well documented.

Still in Beta

It is important to note, though, that the service is still in beta right now and that developers are limited to sending out messages to no more than 10 recipients at a time. Also, while Zeep Mobile has plans to expand beyond the U.S. in the future, the service can only send messages within the U.S. for now and is also limited to a select number of carriers.

Overall, though, this seems like a service worth looking into for developers who wants to start adding some SMS functionality to their applications without having to pay some of Zeep Mobile's competitors like SMS Everywhere, Clickatell, or Celltrust.

Out of the 2.7 billion people with mobile phones, those not carrying a smartphone still represent the majority of handset owners. But these people deserve an easy way to access their email and social network notifications, too, even if they can't afford or don't want to pay for a sophisticated smartphone.

Says Michael Maguire, founder and CTO, who previously worked in the BlackBerry Applications team at Research In Motion, "My team and I think there are some great dedicated mobile email devices out there - but we're biased, because half of us helped build one of them. Unfortunately the rest of the world's 1.1 billion email users have phones with unusable, hard to configure in-built email that few people can be bothered to set-up. With BlueWhaleMail, we've gone back to the drawing board so that people can keep the phone they like and still stay in touch on the go."

At the moment, the BlueWhaleMail app is only available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson phones, but that list will grow in time as BlueWhaleMail branches out to serve the needs of those who carry "ordinary" mobile phones.

Where To Download

BlueWhaleMail can be downloaded from http://apps.facebook.com/bluewhalemail/ or by browsing to m.bluewhale.net on your mobile phone. The application is ad-supported and features a small banner ad at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer.

To learn more about BlueWhaleMail, check out this video, where founder Michael Maguire discusses the application:

BlueWhaleMail Interview with Michael Maguire - video powered by Metacafe

The first phones using Google's Android platform were meant to go to market by the second half of this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, Google is facing some major setbacks thanks to the intricacies of the cell phone business.

In the international market, Google is also facing a number of problems. China Mobile apparently has problems translating the Android software into Chinese characters.

Unlike Apple, which put a lot of pressure on AT&T to retain control of both the hardware and software, Google is pursuing a different strategy by just providing the software platform and leaving everything else to the hardware manufacturers and network providers.

This news is definitely coming at a bad time for Google. Apple is set to release the next version of its iPhone on July 11th and a lot of buyers who were in the market for a modern smartphone and considered waiting for an Android phone might now move to an Apple or Blackberry device instead.