As promised, the Google fronted Open Handset Alliance lifted the curtain on the Android platform on Monday, with the release of its Software Development Kit (SDK).

Android is a complete mobile platform built on the Linux 2.6 kernel, with an application model that claims to make it easy for developers to extend, replace, and reuse existing software components to create rich mobile services.

The platform also includes the Dalvik virtual machine, which Google said will maximise application performance, portability, and security. The entire platform will be made available under the Apache v2 open source license in 2008.

Google has put together a video showing off the features of Android on devices that the platform developers have been playing with for six months already. We at telecoms.com can’t help but notice that it looks like a cross between the Java-based SavaJe operating system and a slightly less polished iPhone feature set. Naturally, there’s a good deal of similarity with other mobile Linux initiatives, such as OpenMoko, to be seen.

The SDK can be downloaded on the Open Handset Alliance site, here.

Google has also announced the Android Developer Challenge, which aims to reward the development of applications for Android with $10m in prizes.

There’s a mix bag of reports about how well the European launch of the iPhone went on Friday. With all the hype over the past few months, I think the telecoms media expected hordes of people to be queuing up outside Apple stores in the UK and Germany way ahead of the evening launch. But it looks like in most cases, potential punters were outnumbered by extra shop staff and security guards.

While the flagship Apple store on Regent Street, London had something of an image queue outside it all Friday, it seems to have been the only one. Most other O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores are reported to have been overstaffed and devoid of customers, the ones we walked past on Friday afternoon were definitely quiet. We might suggest it had something to do with the fact that it was the same weekend the Sex Pistols were playing their reunion gigs [I went to that instead on Friday - it rocked - and unlike the Apple shop, it was sold out].

The Guardian agrees that there were no real queues, although the Newcastle Journal is reporting that literally “scores of people” were queuing. The Telegraph seems to think there was a big demand, and Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg seems to have an inside track on thousands been sold, as does Pocket-lint.

I just dropped O2 a line to see how things went and was told, “to have queues of people from Aberdeen in Scotland down to Brighton has been amazing.”

Apparently, the iPhone is the fastest selling handset O2 UK has ever seen and, “sales are bang on expectations. Footfall into
our stores over the weekend was three times higher than normal. On Friday night, we had more than 50% more traffic to our website than normal”. The operator also revealed that two thirds of iPhone activations are new customers.

I’m not disputing O2’s claims, but I just have to point out this wonderful collection of pics on the Dialaphone site. Obviously, Dialaphone isn’t selling the iPhone so it might just be sour grapes but I think there’s some fair comment here.

It’s been an eventful week in the wild world of telecoms. Google set the pace on Monday with the launch of Android and the Open Handset Alliance, which has been met with mixed reception:

Bill Weinberg, general manager of the LiPS Forum, is a bit mixed up about the whole thing, mainly because he wears so many Linux hats.

While Stuart Carlaw, research director at ABI Research warns that Symbian’s apparently arrogant attitude towards Android could be its downfall.

Later on in the week, Nokia and Vodafone struck a deal to get Nokia’s Ovi platform pride of place on a number of exclusive Vodafone handsets, which got Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis wondering whether Nokia would ever be really controversial with Ovi and start to include VoIP applications on the platform?

And finally the week rounded off with the cancellation of Sprint and Clearwire’s joint WiMAX rollout. Bad news for WiMAX, but not the only bad news for Sprint. Patti Reali and Tole Hart over at Gartner note that Sprint’s jointt venture with the US cable companies for wireless and wireline integration is also in danger of falling apart. While the company’s Pivot FMC solution is also becoming unhinged.

Oh, and as if we needed any more reminding, the iPhone is going to hit the UK and Germany on Friday night. Jonathan Arber at Ovum discusses the hype.

Here in London people are already queuing outside the Apple shop on Regent Street. A word of advice to anyone looking to get one quickly tonight, when I walked past the O2 shop on Oxford Street a couple of hours ago, there was not a soul to be seen. No queue!

That was a familiar playground shout when the Informer was a scab-kneed schoolboy, and one that appears to have replicated itself in the world of corporate telecoms.

In August last year, you’ll remember, China Mobile’s subscriber base became the biggest of any cellular carrier across the globe. This robbed Vodafone of a key piece of press release bombast, given that it could no longer describe itself as the world’s largest mobile operator.

This week, the Informer got a Vodafone Group press release that led with a sentence describing Big V as “the world’s largest mobile operator by revenue”. We’re not sure how long Voda’s been describing itself thus, but if it isn’t a Sid James-style ‘up yours’ at China Mobile, presumably accompanied by a two-fingered salute and a raspberry, then the Informer doesn’t know what is.

This corporate thumb sucking strikes the Informer as a bit needless. We all know Voda’s big and important. And the fact that it selected revenue as the KPI, rather than the more important financial markers like profit and margin - in which, we can safely assume, Vodafone does not lead the mobile world - just makes the whole thing look a bit daft. Because as the Informer was told when he first undertook training in the weird glyphs of financial reports, the only thing that really matters is the bottom line.

Voda’s Q2 figures are out next week, according to a terse response received by the Informer from one of the firm’s power-dressed city PRs. It’s got $20.7bn - China Mobile’s second quarter profit this year - to beat.

If there are any other carriers out there yearning to describe themselves as the world’s largest in any way, the Informer has a few ideas for you:

1. The World’s Largest Mobile Operator By Average Employee Height. A good one, this, because height is often associated with strength and power. We’d look to the Netherlands for such a descriptor, as the Dutch are officially the tallest nation in the world. Come on KPN, let’s see that press release.

The Dutch overtook The US as the world’s tallest nation earlier this year. Boffins behind the research that revealed this development suggest that part of the reason for the US being overshadowed might be poor diet. So it would probably be a US carrier that chose to describe itself as…

2. The World’s Largest Mobile Operator By Body Mass Index. Oh, what an intro that would be: “ObesiCom Cellular, the fattest mobile operator in the world, today announces the acquisition of a great big box of Krispy Kreme Donuts.”

3. The World’s Largest Mobile Operator By Footprint (Actual). This doesn’t relate to coverage footprint, it relates to actual footprint - the operator with the biggest feet. The Informer’s sure the corporate alpha-males at this operator would be only too happy to publicise their status. After all, you know what they say about the size of a man’s feet.

4. The World’s Largest Mobile Operator By Footprint (Carbon). Unlikely that anyone would own up to this, really. But the larger the player, the greater the carbon output.

Phew! After all that, it’s time for some news. If you’re interested, the Vodafone press release that inspired the above meanderings covered a deal with Nokia that will see a range of Voda services integrated with Nokia’s Ovi portal services on an upcoming range of phones.

It’s something of a coup for Nokia, winning validation from a player of Vodafone’s scope. Although, you could argue, as Ovum suggested, that Vodafone may be more interested in the control it can exert over Nokia’s service provision aspirations.

If you want some more big stuff, the Mobile Data Association this week revealed that UK mobile users send more than one billion text messages a week. Which is more than the total number sent here in 1999. The monthly total for September, said the MDA, was 4,825,000,000, which is up 25 per cent year on year, and looks set to bust a forecast or two.

It won’t be long before all of those messages, and billions of others around the world, are passing before the All Seeing, Ad-serving Eye of Google, as the webmonster’s handset play (stage 1) was unveiled this week.

In 2005 Google gobbled up a little known mobile software firm called Android, founded by Andy Rubin. Rubin was the man who launched Danger Inc, and thrust the Hiptop and the Sidekick onto an unsuspecting - and largely uninterested - world of consumers. Android has been in development at Google ever since, and emerged gleaming from the underground bunker this week.

It’s a ’software stack’, comprising an OS, some middleware, a user interface and a bunch of applications. So who’s going to use it?

Google’s no dumb-bum and wouldn’t leave a thing like that to chance, so it’s engineered another creation: The Open Handset Alliance. This is a group of operators, handset vendors, chip-mongers and software houses whose collective mission is to “accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience,” according to the group’s website, which also lists all the members.

Naturally Google wouldn’t own up to having created the OHA (yes! another acronym) all on its own. If it offered anything other than a ‘no comment’ every time the Informer got in touch with it, Google would probably say that the grouping was born out of a shared vision of blah, a mutual desire to blah and a universal realisation that blah-di-blah-di-blah-blah. But the sole purpose of the OHA in the initial stages is to build on Android, which Google owns.

Motorola is hardly a surprise inclusion from the manufacturer side of the fence. With the US firm having publicly committed to Linux as its OS of choice (on which Android is based), and despite it buying a stake in UIQ out of Sony Ericsson’s suitcase, the Informer fully expects to see a RAZR Android in the not too distant future.

Other vendors along for the ride include Samsung and HTC. Noticeably absent is Nokia, which will want to keep Android away from its 40 per cent market share. And yet, the Finnish firm was all smiles when the OHA was announced.

“It’s a positive development, in that another big company is publicly recognising the importance of mobility,” said Kari Tuutti, director of communications for the Multimedia unit at Nokia. “The [Open Handset] Alliance is promoting openness, which is something we all agree on, along with an agreed set of standards and giving the consumer more choice,” he said, “so in terms of motivation, we are aligned.”

Well, yes. But then opposing sides in a bitter civil war are aligned in terms of motivation: they both want to run the country. Sony Ericsson was another no-show at the OHA, sticking with Nokia in the Symbian stronghold.

On the operator side, big names included China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica and T-Mobile, the last perhaps included principally for reasons of loyalty. It was the only carrier to sell the Hiptop and Sidekick.

Android will release an SDK on November 12th, and the platform will be made available for free to operators and device manufacturers under a progressive open source licence.

Remarkably, the Informer has yet to see an article or press release describe Android as an iPhone killer. From an operator’s perspective, the real iPhone killer might just be the sheer amount of effort and money that needs to be expended in order to take the thing to market. Witness O2 in the UK, ahead of today’s iPhone launch.

If O2’s preparatory work were a buffet, it would be orchid and truffle stuffed roast swans with great big bowls of beluga caviar and chips, and hen harriers on toast, all served with pint jugs of Krug Clos du Mesnil (that’s a posh champagne). The carrier has put on quite a spread.

It’s hired an extra 1,427 staff to cope with what it anticipates will be huge demand for the 200,000 units it’s got tucked away to see it through until the New Year. In Scotland, 700 fresh, specialist call centre staff have been added to 300 retrained employees in the carrier’s Glasgow call centre.

A further 727 in-store workers have been drafted in “to ensure the best possible customer experience for new iPhone customers.” Every O2 retail store will have at least one iPhone specialist to talk customers through the features of the handset, and wave away the absence of 3G with a pearly-toothed smile.

What with the recruitment costs, the wage bills, the training costs for existing staff, the overheads, the EDGE upgrade costs and the hefty kick-back O2’s giving to Apple, you’ve got to wonder what customers are going to have to spend to generate O2 some revenue out of all this.

Sticking with the iPhone, debutante US carrier partner AT&T has launched a data roaming plan for the Apple handset that offers its customers 50MB of data each month for $59.99. That’s on top of the $59.99 - $219.99 that users pay in monthly bundle charges, depending on the tariff they’ve opted for after they’ve dropped $399 on the phone itself. So there you go, O2, that’s the way to do it.

The plan offers access in 29 countries where preferential rates have been arranged that will see users paying $5.12 per MB if they exceed their bundle. Roaming outside of this network of partners, customers will see that charge moving very close indeed to $20. Ker-ching!

In other US carrier news, Sprint’s plans for WiMAX have taken quite a knock, as its roll-out pact with Clearwire looks to have been scrapped. Clearwire put out its Q3 results this week. The internet provider has managed to more than double its revenues for the quarter year on year to $41.3m, while also more than trebling its losses to $81.4m.

And away down the results release the firm included a paragraph that distances it from the Sprint deal. “Clearwire and Sprint Nextel continue their discussions regarding how best to collaborate for the deployment of a nationwide mobile WiMAX network,” the firm said. “Over the course of the parties’ discussions, Clearwire and Sprint concluded that the joint build transaction originally contemplated by the previously announced letter of intent was likely to introduce a level of additional complexity to each party’s business that would be inconsistent with each company’s focus on simplicity and the customer experience. Consequently, the parties have agreed to terminate their obligations under the letter of intent, although discussions continue regarding the best means to accomplish the benefits that were expected under the letter of intent. Notwithstanding the ongoing discussions, there can be no assurance that a transaction or agreement between Clearwire and Sprint Nextel will be concluded.”

There’s nothing like straight talk, is there.

On the topic of faltering partnerships, you may recall that, a few weeks back, Peter Loescher, the CEO of Siemens was having a whinge about the performance of Nokia Siemens Networks. And as well he might, because his firm’s Equity Investment unit this week posted a loss of EUR11m in the quarter to end September. The same period last year delivered a profit of EUR75m. The loss was largely down to NSN, which has cost the unit a loss of EUR429m for fiscal ‘07.

Rumblings from Siemens have led some to suggest that the firm wants out of the NSN joint venture, although a meeting understood to be slated for later this month is expected to lead to more concrete information on Siemens’ ongoing participation.

NSN has had some success over in Finland, where second-placed carrier Elisa is claiming a world first with the commercial launch this week of WCDMA in its GSM900 spectrum. The firm’s been working with Nokia Siemens Networks, trialling the vendor’s frequency re-farming product for the last year, and it looks like it works.

Elisa’s planning to use the tech to boost indoor 3G coverage as well as extending it to rural areas. There aren’t that many handsets around, though. Nokia’s supplied one - the 6121 Classic - but one model is hardly critical mass.

And that’s about all we’ve got time for this week, so it’s farewell from the world’s largest weekly wireless email roundup by… erm, by… by God!

It seems that the whole industry’s gone femto crazy this week. And it’s largely the fault of the Femto Forum, which after getting off to a bit of a wobbly start three or four months ago, has come up smelling of roses with the backing of the major infrastructure players.

Femtocells look like they could be a big business for all concerned, representing a massive global opportunity for vendors, operators, content providers and consumers. According to Pyramid, the femtocell opportunity represents 30 per cent of the total 3G subscriber base by the end of 2010, two years after the expected commercial launch.

And given the disappointing results from the infrastructure vendors in the last quarter, I wonder if femtocells and picocells represent a decent revenue stream for the kit makers. It certainly looks like operators see them as an important mechanism for improving network performance and controlling infrastructure costs.

Check out our focus on femtocells.

It’s finally happened. Google has activated its Android and set its sights firmly on Nokia/Symbian and Microsoft. And it looks like most of the rumours were right - Android is an operating system, middleware, a user interface and a set of applications. And it’s free. It’s got three of the top five handset vendors on board as well as 31 other companies, including hardware manufacturers and operators. For Moto, this looks like make or break time - if Android is successful it could help the company pull its fat out of the fire. For the rest of the handset vendors it looks like they’ll be split into two camps.

At the moment, the Google announcement raises a whole load more questions, only some of whcih will be answered by the release of the Software Development Kit (SDK) on November 12.

The departure of CEO Gary Forsee, combined with the poor performance of Sprint Nextel is putting the company’s WIMAX rollout in an increasingly precarious position.

The operator reported a 77 per cent drop in third quarter net income from $279m a year ago to $64m this year, while consolidated net operating revenues also fell to $10bn, compared to $10.5bn in the year ago third quarter. Also during the third quarter, the carrier noted capital investments of $73m related to the WiMAX initiative and wireless capital spending is expected to increase significantly in the fourth quarter.

Some aren’t goig to like that, especially rebel shareholder Ralph Whitworth. Is this the beginning of the end for the WiMAX poster child?

“Mother said I was a dancer before I could walk,” sang one of the ladies from Abba, although the Informer doesn’t know if it was the demure blonde, or the slightly intimidating brunette. Even as an infant, the Informer found this statement a little hard to take in. You can’t dance before you can walk, just like you can’t run before you can walk, although this industry’s certainly tried that a few times - not least with music services.

Music was front and centre this week, in the UK at least, as Nokia and Vodafone went toe to toe with their new service launches. The Nokia Music Store is what might politely be described as an homage to Apple’s iTunes. Tracks are £0.80 and albums are £8.00. With Nokia’s solution, as with Apple’s, tracks can be downloaded to a personal computer (it’s Windows XP or Vista only, surprise surprise) but out and about, they’ll only download to, or play on, the Finn’s phones.

And at launch, only two models are compatible, the N81 and the 8GB N95. Downloaders own what they buy, but woe betide the user if they switch to a competitor handset, because they’ll have to carry their laptop around with them if they want to listen to music on the hop.

Vodafone’s service, Music Station, is based on the platform from Omnifone that Telenor launched in June this year. Payment is by subscription, at £1.99 per week. There are no limitations on the number of tracks downloaded straight to the handset and there is no data transfer charge for downloads. Music from the catalogues of BMG, EMI Music and Warner Music is available and all downloads are stored on a central server, with only the most favoured playlists living on the handset. The storage model means that if a user changes their handset, or if it’s stolen, the content will not be lost.

But here’s the catch - and you may remember we’ve discussed this before: If you stop paying your weekly sub, or if you move to another carrier, then - poof! - everything you’ve paid for is lost.

There aren’t any teenagers at the Informer’s office, thank God. He couldn’t be doing with all that sulking and skulking. But he’d like to know what they make of the idea, because Music Station is clearly being pointed in their direction. The 20- and 30-something hoarders with which the Informer is surrounded were aghast at the idea of paying for something that you lose if you change mobile provider.

But one of them suggested thinking about it “with a young mind”. In many ways, the Informer’s about as juvenile as they come but, try as he might, he couldn’t get comfortable with the idea. Whether or not The Kids are going to be happy to pay a weekly rental for just the music they want right at this moment remains to be seen.

If you have any teenagers in your life, ask them about the idea and let the Informer know what they think on his blog. You can even let him know your own thoughts, if you want. He’ll be in the pub, raising a glass of snakebite and black to the memory of the limited edition double album on blue vinyl, with gatefold cover.

What the Nokia and Vodafone offerings have in common is that they’re trying to turn music into a loyalty tool. It would be better if Vodafone’s service was run independently by Omnifone, with all operators signed up. Then you could move between them and never lose your music collection. And the Informer wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what Omifone has in mind for the future - once its pesky exclusivity deal with Vodafone expires.

At the launch of the service, Vodafone exposed unsuspecting journalists to a live show from Girls Aloud, a quintet of spindly, foundation-caked squawkers born out of some hellish reality show. Elsewhere this week, it was dealing with other, more mobile operatorly issues

The Bombay High Court has given its government the go-ahead to chase Voda down for what it claims is $2bn in unpaid capital gains tax following the $11bn purchase of Indian carrier Essar in May this year. Vodafone reckons it’s going to slip the punch, though.

Back on its home turf, Vodafone unveiled its second MVNO in as many weeks, partnering with Lebara Mobile to launch a SIM-only service targeted at the UK’s resident immigrant and migrant worker market. Official estimates suggest that 8 per cent of the UK workforce falls into this category, and Vodafone itself estimates that the market is in the region of 1.5 million users.

Lebara’s no newcomer - it already operates in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Spain. The two firms have yet to release the pricing strategy for the UK operation, which will support its customers with own-language after sales service. But Vodafone already offers a prepay rate of £0.05 per minute to landlines in China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Lithuania, Latvia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Thailand and Turkey, so the Lebara price will have to compete on a similar level.

Carphone Warehouse runs a similar MVNO - Mobile World - on T-Mobile’s network and, last week, Vodafone and CPW announced a no-frills MVNO collaboration as well.

A few years’ back, the prevailing thinking around MVNOs was that they would enable countless non-telecoms brands to enter the market - fizzy drinks firms, clothing labels and football teams would all have their own operations. But it hasn’t quite worked out like that, with a number of big brand MVNOs enduring public failure. Now it seems like the MVNO is far more of a strategic tool for the operator, and close involvement between host and passenger appears critical to success.

The importance of collaboration was demonstrated pretty effectively in Serbia this week, when m-payments outfit Upaid launched a new SMS top up service. VP for commercial operations, Terry Trench, told the Informer a while back that the service was “pretty boring”. After all, it simply enables users to top up their prepaid account - 80 per cent of Serbs opt for up front payment - from their handset, putting the payment directly onto their Visa card. Handy, but not particularly inspiring.

What really seems remarkable about the service, though, is that Upaid has signed up every operator in the country, 16 banks and two card payment organisations. Discussions are underway with the nation’s utility firms in the hope that bill payment will be the next addition to the service. That sort of collective motivation is a rare find and it took Upaid three years from signing up the first operator, to signing up the final bank. It’s a project worth keeping an eye on.

Right, it’s Bad News O’Clock, and this is not a good time to be the CFO of a large kit vendor. Much like Ericsson’s Karl-Henrik Sundstrom last week, Alcatel Lucent’s CFO Jean-Pascal Beaufret gave it the heroic “Go on! Save yourselves! I’ll only slow you down” speech this week as the Franco US joint venture mirrored relations between the two countries by not doing very well at all.

At the sharp end, another 4,000 jobs will have gone on the block by the end of next year, bringing the total number of redundancies since the two firms merged to 16,500. Q3 saw AL lose EUR258m - it’s third quarterly loss on the trot - compared with a profit of EUR532m for the same period in 2006. Revenues were down 7.8 per cent year on year to EUR4.35bn.

And while CEO Patricia Russo clung onto her job, the CFO got it in the neck. His position is to be filled by Hubert de Pesquidoux, up until now the man in charge of AL’s Enterprise Group.

The Informer found himself wondering why it should be that, in the cases of both Ericsson and Alcatel Lucent, it was the head bean counter that should take the fall and not the CEO who, after all, is responsible for company strategy. So he nipped downstairs into Informer Towers’ Dickensian basement to see his own CFO, who was busy shouting at one of his minions for putting another lump of coal on the fire.

“It’s fair enough,” said the Informer’s CFO, idly toying with his abacus, “that CFOs carry the can if it is clear that they have not managed expectations very well.” Thus, a surprise downturn, like Ericsson’s last week, means that the markets had not been kept sufficiently informed of impending peril. But it seems a bit unfair on Beaufret, because everybody knew that Alcatel Lucent has been having a shocker since its inception. Then again, he’s presumably getting a whacking great payout, so we don’t need a sympathy whip-round just yet.

“These are difficult but necessary decisions, and we will manage these reductions with care,” said Russo, eenie-meenie-minie-mowing her way down the company’s employment register. “With this plan, the company is targeting gross margins in the high 30s and operating margins of ten per cent or better in the post integration phase beginning 2010.” And relax.

Russo introduced a hasty reorganisation of the upper echelons, with two new regional structures and a seven-strong management committee/buffer zone put in place. Still, the cake tastes the same, whichever way you cut it.

Elsewhere, BT’s still doing its bit to keep the wifi dream alive, launching a range of prepaid vouchers for business travellers. Pitching wifi against costly cellular roaming charges, BT’s international wifi vouchers offer 500 minutes of access - for web or VoIP use - for £28 in the US and £40 in Europe. The carrier also announced a deal with internet provider iBahn, which goes live this month, that will see an extra 1,200 hotels added to the existing 9.600 where BT Openzone customers can already access international wifi.

While we’re on the subject of VoIP, the UK’s 3 launched a Skype phone this week, which the two firms developed in partnership with Qualcomm. The phone uses the Californian money machine’s Brew platform.

Skype’s popular with users because it’s free, of course. But because it’s free, it doesn’t make any money, which is slightly frustrating. Just ask eBay. But 3 is making a bold move and banking on the lure of minimal-cost internet calling as a powerful attractant in the run up to Christmas and beyond.

Thinking-house Ovum’s John Delaney wasn’t so sure, suggesting that while users could be drawn in, projects like the Skype phone and the X-Series, which comes with low cost all-you-can-eat tariffs, could create problems for 3 if it gets relegated to pipe status. Doubtless the offering will put pressure on 3’s competitors, though.

Some of those competitors are involved in a massive investment plan in sub-Saharan Africa, it was announced this week. A group of operators, including Orange, Vodacom and Middle Eastern carrier Zain are to plough more than $50bn into the region in a concerted bid to extend mobile coverage to over 90 per cent of the population.

As well as spreading coverage, the project will look to sign up as many as 350 million sub-Saharan Africans who are within existing carrier footprints but who are not yet connected.

Maybe it’s not necessarily a rich man’s world, after all.

The UK is going a bit mobile music crazy at the moment. This morning I went down to Paper in London to watch Girls Aloud at the launch of Omnifone’s Music Station service on the Vodafone network, which coincidentally also signalled the first time BlackBerry users have been able to get tunes onto their devices. Then there was also Nokia’s mobile music shop opening its doors - and all this ahead of the iPhone launch next week.

The Nokia idea looks like an identikit copy of Apple’s iTunes strategy. You can get tracks on your Nokia device or your PC and that’s all, while Voda’s strategy is more about renting music. I think to date, people have been a bit obsessed with what they get to ‘keep’ after paying their money. It may be true that if you stop paying Voda, you can’t access your tracks, but I see it more as a user controlled radio station - for £8 a month you get to change the music on your device as much and as often as you like.

Ok so you can’t have the music on you computer at home, or burn to a CD. I don’t know whether that is in the works but it seems like a natural progression to extend music rental to the PC at least. However, what the recent incarnations of the iPod have proved is that the portable MP3 player is also becoming the main stereo in the home through the addition of docking stations with big speakers.

Ideally, Omnifone needs Music Station deals with all the operators in the UK. Then when a subscriber moves to another carrier they can take their content with them. Unfortunately there’s an exclusivity deal between Voda and Omnifone, so it looks like Voda is counting on the service to build customer loyalty.

For the labels, well it looks like they’re coming to terms with the fact that people are just going to rip their music off BitTorrent or whatever anyway, so they’re looking for other ways to monetise content that doesn’t result in a permanent delivery. Rental is an excellent model for them - everyone is a repeat customer and a constant revenue stream.

One thing I don’t understand is: if Voda can sell you unlimited music downloads for less than £8 per month, including data charges, how on earth can it get away with asking £7.50 for a “huge 120MB” of data per month? Are mobile web users subsidising the download of hundreds of tracks a month because the music service subs are more likely to be ‘loyal’ customers?