Music and your mobile

With the arrival of the iPod dawned a new age in music on the move. Now mobile phone manufacturers have cottoned onto this trend. It’s a captive market too – practically everyone now has a mobile so giving them music playing capabilities in a world where everything seems small enough to fit into your pocket is a logical step.

Whilst few mobiles are, as yet, a substitute iPod, there’s an ever expanding variety of handsets around that feature built in MP3 players. So whilst storing your entire music collection on your phone may not be entirely practical just yet, there’s no denying that it’s a pretty smart function to have.

MP3 mobiles vary widely in size, sound quality, memory and functionality. A small memory only leaves space for MP3 ringtones whilst some phones have enough memory to store a huge music collection.

But the mobile market is fast paced and people tend to replace their handsets regularly – so although there are some fantastically capable music phones out there, you might not want to replace your dedicated MP3 player with an MP3 mobile just yet.

If you want your favourite song to alert you to incoming calls, an MP3 phone lets it happen. Connect wirelessly to websites from your mobile and download the latest songs and popular polyphonic ringtones.

Likewise, you can access the web via your 3G handset and quickly download your favourite songs then store them in your mobile music library.

Nokia were the first to launch a mobile phone with built in FM radio. Now there are hoards of mobiles with the ability to receive your favourite FM radio station using wireless technology. The phone cleverly scans the airwaves for the strongest signal and lets you listen to the radio through earphones. The downside is that the radio does tend to cut out when dips in signal are experienced, although technology to reduce this is being developed and it probably won’t be long before crackles are a thing of the past.

Most MP3 enabled phones have a reasonable amount of built in memory and many now also have external memory cards. These can easily be removed and slotted into your compatible PC for quick and easy upload and download of data.

To have a good number of songs you’d need a lot of memory to store them on so look out for handsets with removable memory (these offer greater capacity than phone memory alone) and plenty of storage space.

As a guide, 1GB of memory can store around 250 songs so a phone with a 512MB memory will easily see you through your daily commute.

Listening to music on your mobile does drain your battery to an extent, the amount varies from phone to phone and on the phone’s functions. Some more dedicated music phones let you switch off the phone part and just listen to music, affording you a good length of tune time.

Whilst an hour’s commute shouldn’t be a problem on most MP3 playing phones, listening to your mobile tunes all day probably will be. Generally speaking, unless you’re happy to charge it up several times a day, use your mobile’s MP3 player quite sparingly.