Walkman phone vs Iphone

IT APPEARS THAT AT&T Wireless wants to join the gang and offer OTA (over-the-air) music downloads thanks to a tie-up with Napster. But it hasn't said which mobile phones it will offer.

This could prove to be a very interesting decision.

The INQ would argue that the logical choice of phone would be a handset from Sony Ericsson which owns the Walkman phone brand.

The W960i, for example, comes with a respectable 8 GB of storage space and is 3G compatible. AT&T now has enough nationwide coverage to make a 3G download service viable.

The W960i isn't expected to become available until November, which – by a handy coincidence – is exactly when AT&T expects the music service to go live.

AT&T stalwarts will be aware that the company already has an OTA service courtesy of Emusic. Which is fine, except for the fact that Emusic tracks are DRM free and that means Emusic can't offer tracks from the Big Four music companies – whereas Napster can.

The fact that AT&T carries the Iphone in the States is seen as one motivation behind launching an OTA service – because Iphone encourages users to 'side-load' their music from a PC rather than get it OTA.

Last month, Apple unveiled a service allowing Iphone users to browse, buy and wirelessly download music at a Wi-fi hotspot for 99 cents.

But AT&T denies that Apple's new download service had anything to do with its own launch. "It didn't have any impact on our internal time to market," Mark Collins, AT&T's head of consumer data services told Dow Jones. "These products take ... months to develop."

Verizon already offers an OTA service via Widerthan, and Groove Mobile supplies Sprint Nextel with its OTA music capability.

But the market is set to grow hugely. Screen Digest forecasts that the global OTA download market will be worth £1.11 billion ($2.28 billion) by 2012 – a ten-fold increase from 2006.

There's also no indication that operator portals could dominate OTA music – after all, once you've got a fixed rate tariff for 3G, you can download what you like.

Which is where companies like Sony Ericsson come in with their mobile music social networks – which means that if you change your network operator, you don't lose all your music. µ