We know what you're thinking -- it's Windows Mobile 6.1 fool, we've got the developers kit already. True, but not the SDK that allows developers to create custom, interactive panels for the touchscreen QWERTY's Panel Interface. Sony Ericsson claims that, "The Xperia X1 will offer the richest mobile user experience, putting the world at the fingertips of the user." In other words, the expectations have been set, developers, so you'd best get to downloading the free SDK -- you've got your work cut out for you. Sony Ericsson will offer a panel download service in the future, showcasing all the panels built by you, Google, and other partners.

The Panel Applications are meant to be simple, rich, and fully-interactive allowing quick access to your data -- eMail, calendar, multimedia, games, IM... you name it. But don't take our word for it, SE explains the new panel ecosystem in the video posted after the break.

Read -- SDK download
Read -- Press Release

While the world still tries to decide if its really into mobile TV or not, Cricket is moving forward with plans assuming that she is. The wholly-owned subsidiary of Leap Wireless has just announced a flat-rate unlimited mobile video service that will enable users with "select handsets" to view one-to-four-minute-long video clips for $5 per month. Watching the clips won't tack on any additional data charges, and as for content, customers can look for clips from FUEL TV, Hollywood Insider and an array of other sources. Nah, there's no live TV (yet), but the pricing sure is admirable.

[Via phonescoop]

Nokia's "free," all-you-can-eat, music subscription service is set to world premier in the UK next month before hitting continental Europe and Asia in 2009. Nokia already has Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music on board and plans to have EMI signed before launch -- in total, Nokia expects to offer some 2.1 million tracks at launch. While touted as free, the service costs will be baked into the price of Nokia's pre-pay 5310 XpressMusic Comes With Music Edition handset (currently priced between £70-£80 for the pay-as-you-go, non-CwM handset) when purchased though the UK's Carphone Warehouse. You must then purchase another CwM-compatible device at the end of the year in order to continue downloading tracks. For those not wishing to re-up with Nokia, your 5310 CwM edition phone will continue to make / receive calls and text messages and, like your computer, continue to playback all those DRM-wrapped WMA tracks -- they will not play anywhere else. While the approach is interesting, the DRM-enabled time-bomb and device lock-in makes the entire model sound fatally flawed to us -- though we're sure that'll be hacked away soon enough. Come on Amazon, now is the time to take your MP3 store global and show these fools how it's done.

Update: Expect the service to launch at, or shortly after, a Nokia Comes With Music press event scheduled for October 2nd.

[Via mocoNews]

Read -- FT
Read -- Guardian
Read -- Nokia press release

Just in time for the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election, MediaFLO has added in a trio of news sources to give you your fix wherever you are. CNBC, MSNBC and FOX News have all been added to the lineup in order to give you varying views on the same topics at hand. Available to Verizon Wireless and AT&T subscribers, the channels will offer simulcast programming in line with what's happening on the tele, though we'd caution you not to watch too much coverage during your morning board meeting.

[Via phonescoop]

What was just a footnote to 2007 has finally come to fruition. Sony Ericsson just went live with details on the August 25th launch of its PlayNow Arena media download site. Initially the site will offer 1 million, DRM-free songs (ramping up to 5 million) from Sony BMG, Warner Music, and EMI. It will also offer games, ringtones, applications, and themes for your mobile downloading pleasures. Other European countries will come on board later this year before it goes global in 2009. Tracks are expected to be "on par" with Apple's iTunes ($0.99 / €0.99) pricing but will cost SEK9 (about $1.43, credit card required) for the Nordic launch. Full press release after the break.

Granted, Norway isn't actually a member of the European Union, which makes it slightly less dramatic that they've rejected the Nokia-tested, EU-approved DVB-H standard in favor of DMB -- but it's still Europe, and this just adds to the ugly, fragmented picture that mobile TV is becoming around there. Germany has all but abandoned DVB-H to go with its free, designed-for-TV counterpart, DVB-T, and the UK has recently hooked up Qualcomm with spectrum for a MediaFLO network, so ubiquitous DVB-H is anything but a guarantee across the continent at this point. The current Norwegian plan calls for nine DMB channels to launch by winter, which may be viewed as a superior technology there because it's better able to cover rural areas in a cost-effective way than DVB-H is. Bottom line: if you'd dreamed of some day carrying a single device from country to country to catch all the spellbinding local TV programming, you might be out of luck for a while.

Here's a little Espoo humor for you: offer a crazy-expensive limited edition of the N96, make buyers think they'll be getting it early, and when they don't, ship them stereo Bluetooth headphones as a consolation prize which -- wait for it -- you need a phone (like that unshipped N96, for example) to use. Whatever, we suppose it's better than getting a cold shoulder, but the silver BH-503s getting shipped to at least some of the Face The Task buyers sure aren't a substitute for the real deal.

Just as we'd envisioned, the Invision candybar (if a phone this stubby can, in fact, be called a candybar) from LG is now a reality for AT&T. The phone becomes just AT&T's third to support its MediaFLO-based Mobile TV service, taking a similar line to Samsung's Access by stuffing a landscape display, 1.3-megapixel camera, and HSDPA into a squarish case that's sure to make minimalists and traditionalists swoon; what's more, it also takes the honor of being AT&T's smallest Mobile TV-equipped handset to date. It's available today for $99.99 with a $50 rebate and two years' worth of commitment -- just be sure to factor the cost of the Mobile TV add-on into your budget.

The follow-on to Motorola's sporty and moderately popular (for a stereo bluetooth headset, anyway) S9 may not have launched yet -- a disappointment, considering the original plan for a Q2 release when it was announced at CES -- but perhaps a little last-minute paint job was the reason for the delay. We've now spotted the S9-HD in a bright white getup with blue accents, a far cry from the black of the model shown at CES (and presumably still slated for launch) or the red of the original, but let's not kid ourselves: this one has a way better chance of finding its way into an ear canal or two. Hopefully we'll see it within a few weeks -- just in time for a successor to be launched at CES 2009, no doubt.

When one music store on your handset just isn't enough, there's Vodafone. Evidently not at all content with just the Omnifone-provided unlimited service, the carrier has just revealed a more traditional outlet for buying music on one's phone. Vodafone Music comes pre-installed on Vodafone live! handsets and can be installed on a plethora of others. Put simply, the application enables users to search for songs right on their mobile and purchase them for playback -- nothing too complicated about that, right? Hit up the read link to see if your current cellie is compatible.

[Via UnwiredView]

Apple's experimented with allowing iTunes to stream over the internet as well as your LAN in the past and quickly removed the feature (probably due to RIAA pressure), so we're not placing too much stock in this, but AppleInsider's unearthed a patent that seems to describe a way to stream music over the 'net to your iPhone / iPod touch. The goal is to prevent you from having to selectively sync content to your device -- instead, you'd sync just the metadata and stream whatever you wanted direct from your machine as though it was all stored locally. There are some obvious problems here -- it wouldn't work if you didn't have service (or over EDGE, really), most home upstream connections aren't that fast, etc., etc., -- but it's certainly interesting, and a welcome addition to local storage if it ever makes the scene. In the meantime, how about working in some of those new UI elements from the Remote app into the iPod app?

[Via Macrumors, thanks Mark]

MobiTV has been around for quite awhile, and although it has seen its fair share of ups and downs, today's a day for celebration in the offices that remain. After hitting the 3 million mark in February, the company is now claiming that its benefiting from some 4 million subscriptions. Charlie Nooney, MobiTV's CEO, was quoted as saying that the firm was "thrilled to be on the cusp of mass market acceptance for mobile entertainment in North America." We don't know if we'd go that far just yet, but here's a tip of the hat to you anyway.

[Via RCRWireless, image courtesy of PDAsNews]

First things first: open wide and ingest a mouthful of salt. Put away that bitter beer face and down it, we said! Okay, now that you're adequately skeptical, get a load of this. Word on the street has it that Nokia is currently working with Microsoft in order to integrate the Zune Marketplace into the former firm's handsets. No, there's no talk of a Zune Phone here -- no new hardware at all, actually. Instead, it seems the two could be figuring out a way to offer Zune Marketplace content on Nokia's prolific "non-smartphones." Make no mistake, Nokia sells quite a few low-end handsets, and if the Redmond powerhouse could get its material on 'em... well, we're pretty sure you see where this could go. Oh, and we're totally not buying this until N-Gage pops up on the Xbox 360.

[Via Electronista]

Seems like the picture's getting clearer by the minute for paid mobile TV content, and it's a pretty bleak picture indeed. Over in Germany, DVB-H subscriptions are dying a slow, painful death (despite a healthy push by the European Union) thanks to free DVB-T content and a lineup of compatible phones to match, and now, Toshiba is shuttering its four-year-old Moba Ho satellite-based service thanks to the overwhelming availability and popularity of one-seg tuners, which like DVB-T in Germany, offer programming at no charge. Technical advantages, and to a large degree, entertainment value both tend to get overlooked when you've got a free product competing against a paid product -- it's frequently a disruptive economic force that takes profit right out of the equation, and Toshiba's learning that lesson the hard way. Keep your chins up, though, guys; at least you lost this battle for an entirely different reason than you did HD DVD, right? Guess that's not helping much. Anyway, expect the service to vaporize by March of next year, with Toshiba planning to take a one-time hit of $232 million for the shutdown.

The problem with selling licenses for spectrum -- any kind of spectrum -- is that there's an implicit assumption that the investment a company's going to make into buying the airwaves and building out the infrastructure necessary to take advantage of it is eventually going to pay off. For the winners of Germany's DVB-H license, though, the economics simply don't make sense; the country's carriers stone-cold gave up on the concept once they lost the license bid, instead turning to bundling DVB-T receivers to steal free signals designed for plain ol' TV reception. The winning bidder, Mobile 3.0, had intended to sell users on packages costing a handful of euros a month -- but "free" is a pretty powerful word, so even if there's a marginal battery performance disadvantage with the DVB-T setup, it's going to be virtually impossible for any pay service to fight it, especially when carriers are putting zero effort into making sure DVB-H tuners are on board their handsets. As best as we can tell, T-Systems' DVB-H trial wrapped up in December, so yeah, that pretty much spells the death of the so-called standard in Bavaria. What say you, EU?

[Via mocoNews]