Napster To Go: All you need, everywhere you are

Do you remember Napster? They're the company that basically invented online sharing of music. This is alternatively known as piracy to some, a way of life to others, and your age likely determines on which side of the debate you fall. Napster has reinvented itself. Again. For a while, they had a service that was indistinguishable from many others: purchase mp3 tracks singly or in albums for a slight bit less than what the CD cost at the store.

Now, Napster has entered the subscription music game. This is an all-you-can-eat plan where you pay them a flat monthly fee of $5 and you can listen to anything you like, and you get to download 5 DRM-free tracks per month. But where it gets interesting is the Napster To-Go plan, clocking in at $15/mo. This gives you access to any of the music on your portable music player.

The basic plan is nice, but comes with only 5 tracks per month, and a requirement that you be tethered to your computer to listen to the 7 million song catalog. Readers of this blog know that I want my music on the go, and this will take forever to fill up the 16GB card in my Nokia phone. But wait, Nokia phones (and Samsung, HTC, Creative, Rio, etc) support the DRM that protects Napster To Go. Using the service is simplicity itself: find music, click transfer to portable device, wait a couple seconds and you're done. Oh, and Mobbler successfully scrobbles the Napster tracks to last.fm!

Napster is not the first to offer this kind of plan. Microsoft's Zune has had a subscription model for a long time, and you get to keep something like 10 tracks per month that are yours if you decide to end the sub. Real has had a model like this for a long time, as well. But neither of these ever really worked for me, they either require a specialized device, had a limited catalog, or limited support for mobile players. Napster To-Go, however, works on just about all Nokia phones. In the course of two nights, I nearly filled the 8GB card in my E75, and I am looking forward to filling up the 16GB in my 5800XM (hey, it's call XpressMusic for a reason!). This is possible, as Napster allows me to copy the tracks to up to three devices at any given time. Even better, is that I do not "use up" tracks by transferring and then getting rid of devices. I can simply tell Napster that I no longer want to use that phone, and it clears the way for me to load the tracks onto something new.

I am actually still in the free 7 day trial phase of using this service, and I have taken full advantage of it with nearly 8GB of music downloaded and much listened to, as my last.fm recent plays will attest. As anyone reading this blog regularly knows, mobile music at a reasonable price and without something else to carry is pretty much the holy grail for me. The ability to instantly grab and transfer anything that catches my fancy so that I have it anywhere just makes me drool. I am not in love with the fact that by signing up with this, I pretty much have to pay for the rest of my life to "keep" the music I listen to, and I wish it came with something like the basic plan of 5 tracks per month that I could keep forever. But seeing that I grabbed 1200 tracks in two days (anywhere between $828 and $1548 at iTunes, depending on what you purchase), I'd say that $15 is a pretty good deal.

DRM obviously places some restrictions on what you can do with the music, but the Napster restrictions are not overly crippling like some schemes in the past. You can burn CDs of the music (does anyone even do this anymore?), place it on up to three portable devices simultaneously, and on to three computers. You cannot -at least not without a little hacking- resize the music files. I like to do this to fit as much music as possible on my device. By sacrificing a little quality, you can often double the amount of tracks on the player. But there are advantages: you no longer have to worry about a hard drive failure that wipes out your collection; all the music is essentially "in the cloud" on Napster's servers and available when and where you want it. And because this is a subscription model, Napster has to work to improve the service to keep you as a customer. Sure, you "lose" the tracks in your collection, but that is probably because you have chosen to go with some other service like Spotify or Last.fm.

This is the future of music, embrace it.

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Listening to SomaFM with Nokia's Internet Radio

SomaFM, one of my favourite Internet radio stations (the other being Radio Paradise) has been working hard to get its iPhone application into the iTunes store and is considering a blackberry application. I guess there has to be "an app for everything" because the iPhone is nothing more than ipod that can make calls when it comes out of the box. The E75 has Internet Radio built in as a part of the radio application. If your phone does not have it, you can download it from the Nokia Internet Radio site.

The first time you fire it up, the radio app will warn you that listening to streaming radio is data intensive, so make sure you either use a wireless ethernet connection or you have an unlimited data plan. Now, choose the search option and then enter the radio station you want to hear. If you've never checked them out, just start by typing 'SomaFM'

The radio app will find all the stations carried by SomaFM, so just select one.

The player will buffer some of the stream before it starts playing so it can better handle network hiccups.

You are going to need a 3G or better connection to listen to SomaFM's 128k streams. When I get homesick for Texas, I choose the Boot Liquor station. Yee-haw!

I also noticed an Internet Radio app at the Ovi store called "Mundu radio" but have not had a chance to try it out.

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Nokia Ovi Store launches to mixed reviews

The Nokia Ovi Store launched today to a number of mixed reviews. It is an important step for both Nokia and the mobile industry. While almost everyone I know talks about the iPhone, the fact is they remain a very small (but massively influential) player in the mobile industry, as this is a direct response to the success of the iTunes app store for the iPhone. Personally, the OviStore launch is not a big deal to me. I'm not what one would call a Normob, rather, I'm a power user and have no problem seeking out and installing apps on my phone either directly on the phone or via the computer using PCSuite.


A change I would make would be the addition of more categories or sub-categories. There are only four real categories at the moment, with a couple additional ones for the apps you have downloaded and the ones that are recommended for you. Browsing could be made more efficient if there were either more categories, or the ability to drill-down into more specific categories. I don't want to create a giant nested tree like you get when calling a credit card company, but a little more differentiation would be welcome.

The client itself is pretty nice; it is fast enough for me and is smart to load the app names and descriptions before loading the images, allowing me to quickly jump to new the next screen if nothing piques my interest. They could have hired @janole from mobileways.de to do the interface. If it were as smooth as Gravity, the experience would be more aesthetically impressive. In the Symbian-Guru's review, he said the app did not remember his user credentials and did not save to the specified location. I have logged in multiple times without having to re-login, and most (but not all) apps have installed seamlessly without further input from me. Some did ask the location (like Skyfire), and I suspect there is a reason for this in the specific app, though I don't know this for sure.

If you prefer to browse on your computer, you can head to the store on your browser, login, and fire apps to your device. A good alternative perhaps when getting your feet wet with the store. Remember, today is the launch, and for more information from one of the primary architects of the Nokia Ovi Store, head on over to MocoNews and their interview with George Linardos.

The reviews are easy to create right there on the device, and I found the ones written by other users very helpful in that it saved me from purchasing a demo of an application. I hope the store works to take that kind of thing off there, as it definitely leaves a bad taste in a person's mouth. No one wants to pay twice for an application.

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Sony eBook Reader - Part I

Earlier this year, I finally bought myself a Sony eBook Reader. I bought the cheaper Sony PRS-505 version because it is lighter than its big brother (the PRS700) and I do not need the ability to touch the screen or high-light text or make notes; I just want to read. This is one of the best investments I have made in a gadget in a long time.

I just love the styling of this thing. When you hold it in your hand, it feels both sleek and solid, with it's all-metal construction at only 1/3 of an inch in thickness. This thing fits in either my laptop bag or a coat pocket without my even noticing it, and carries hundreds of books, RSS feeds, pictures, and mp3s for all my entertainment needs. The battery lasts a ridiculously long time at 7500 page turns (drawing the page takes the majority of the energy, sitting idle almost nothing).

But the main draw of this device is that I have not yet purchased a book for it. Even though I've read over 20 books on the thing (and have over 100 stored), all of them have either been in the public domain and copyright-free or I have checked them out from my local library. That's right, the Sony reader supports the Adobe Digital Editions DRM scheme, used by thousands of libraries across the country, and Adobe's own bookstore. When I "check out" a book from the library at home using my computer, it transfers to my Sony Reader and expires after 21 days. No having to go to the library, nor returning the books.

Although I could pretty much do this already with a combination of calibre and the Gutenberg Project, I just noticed a new feature of the Sony Bookstore: effortless transfer of books from Google Books to the Sony Reader! That quick setup just added 500,000 books that are out of copyright and free to put on the reader. Amazing, even though I'm not fond of the Sony eBook software as much as calibre and Adobe Digital Editions.

In the next piece or two, I'll describe how the different software works and how transferring books to the Sony reader works. For the most part, it is very easy, but i you're either cheap and/or enjoy really esoteric things like me, you may have to deal with some format conversion. It's easy.

When people see me reading this, they ask if it is a Kindle, even though I ave never seen a Kindle in the wild and have seen two other people with Sony readers, the Kindle is the one people think about (kudos, Amazon). Let me break down the Sony Reader and Kindle differences for you quickly.

Sony: has capability to play mp3s (which means audio books) just cannot do the read out loud whatever you are reading that the Kindle II does. The Sony must be connected to the computer to add books. You can place any pdf, book from the Gutenberg project, HTML page, etc onto the Sony at no charge. You can check out books from the San Jose library and place them on the Sony. They expire in 21days. Has a bookstore navigable with the software installed on a PC.

Kindle: can read you the book so you don't have to. Can download over "whispernet" at no charge other than the cost of the book. Cannot view pdfs (yet, the DX will, i am not sure about the current). You can send it books in other text formats (html? mobi? txt?) but there is a nominal charge for this. You cannot checkout library books. Has a bookstore navigable via the web or on the device.

The thing about the iphone app that is soooo cool is that you can read on your kindle, pick up right there on the iPhone, and then go back to the Kindle and it is where you left off. That's due to the always-connected part of each device. I love this because when I am really into a book, I can't stop reading it and want it to be everywhere I am. As thin as the Sony reader is, it does not fit in my jeans pocket (although it does fit in almost every coat pocket I have), and with this, I would never stand in line, thinking "damn, this is long, where's my book?!" But, if you think most of your reading will be in short, sub-15 minute intervals, an eBook reader is not for you anyway.

The screen is the same between the two devices. I think the controls are nicer on the Sony, but that is my opinion and I have never actually played w/ a Kindle. I hear the controls on the Kindle II are far better than the original.

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Nuka and Pave (your mobile device) for Sanity's sake

When things go wrong, sometimes a nuke and pave is the best thing you can do to reclaim your sanity. Read on to find out how I fixed my broken Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
by restoring it to the original settings and then restoring all my data to save me hours of (re)configuration time.

The browser on my Nokia 5800XM recently stopped working. When opening a web page, it would load up halfway and then for some reason the loading would freeze and the browser became stuck. I could not exit; I couldn't force quit through the start up menu, and if that browser was launched by another application (e.g. gravity) then that app was dead as well. This was damned frustrating and I stopped using my 5800 and went back to the trusty N82.

But the 5800 is supposed to be my daily device. It's a great music, video, and social media device and fun to use, so I decided it was time to start over. Almost.

First, I connected it to my PC and performed a backup using PCSuite. The USB on the 5800 is pretty darn fast, so a backup only takes a few minutes. Then, unplug, open up the dialer pad and type in *#7370# (you may have to have the v20 or newer firmware, but you should be running this anyway). The phone will ask you for the lock code (12345 if you have never manually set it) in an annoying entry screen where you have to hit the '1' key five times because it is cycling through the . , ; : characters. Now the phone will power down and reset. When it comes back, it will be just like when you took the phone out of the box. Sorry, if you have scratched your screen or cracked the casing, a hard reset will not fix this.


When it came up, I plugged it back into the computer, associated it with PCSuite, and performed a restore. Because I use Ovi for syncing my contacts and calendar, I decided not to restore that information in the hopes of forestalling corrupted contacts and proceeded. Restart the device once again, and it looked very familiar. Because I restored the settings, the Ovi profile was there. I did a "copy all from server" option and it pulled down my contacts, calendar, and notes. A few apps were not restored during the restore process (Nokia Messaging and ScreenSnap) and the Amazon Unbox videos I had on the memory card no longer worked because it said I was missing a certificate. I suppose I merely have to reconnect it to theUnbox program, but haven't had a chance yet.

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