Stream music on your PC to your phone

Reuben Lee | Nov 26, 2007

Imagine having your entire 10,000-song collection accessible on your mobile phone wherever you go. This is all possible due to a new service that Singapore mobile carrier StarHub has just announced. Launched over the past weekend in Singapore, Music Anywhere lets users remotely access music as well as photos stored on their PCs at home.

According to the service provider, music is streamed via 3G or HSPA networks, so a 3G/HSDPA handset and home PC with broadband connection will be needed to use the service. Besides remote access, users can also download the music files from the home PC into the phone memory for offline usage. (Note: According to StarHub, the songs are transcoded real-time to save on phone memory space.) It is estimated that Music Anywhere can access up to only 25,000 songs. This is due to the limited memory on the phone for caching the song list, though StarHub expects to up the cap once the phone's onboard memory increases. There is, however, no limit to the size of each song file. Podcasts can be accessed via the service, too.

While users can view photos from the PC on their phones, these will be compressed versions of the images. StarHub estimates that a one megabyte 5-megapixel photo may be compressed to between 7.5KB and 50KB, depending on the phone type and screen resolution. There are no plans for the mobile carrier to support video file access at this point.

The software needed to run the service works only on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS (if you are running BootCamp or Parallels Desktop for Mac). It is also understood from StarHub that at any one time, only one PC and one phone can be paired for use with this service.

The service provider is offering a free one-month trial for its Music Anywhere service during this launch period, after which a flat fee of S$10.70 will be charged for unlimited usage up till March 31, 2008. After that, expect a regular charge of S$10.70 for the first 88 hours of usage and S$0.535 for every hour thereafter (up to a cap of S$16.05).

Take note that this service is available only to StarHub Mobile's post-paid subscribers and, for now, those using the following 12 Sony Ericsson models (K610i, K618i, K770i, K800i, K810i, K850i, T650i, W660i, W850i, W880i, W900i and W910i). Phones from the other brands will be gradually added for use with this service in the coming months.

Filed under: Mobile Phones
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