Cingular launches radio service on mobile phone

Cingular launches radio service on mobile phone

Cingular Wireless has announced the availability of a radio service for its mobile phone customers. They are offering around 40 channels of commercial-free music from Music Choice and MobiTV Inc.’s streaming media service for the consumers of their mobile phone services. Cingular is using data connections to Cingular’s phones for this facility and it becomes just latest of their non-telephony related service.

They are also soon going to enter the competitive market of music download service. Cingular says that downloading music from the internet to mobiles is going to be the next hot market around. In addition, privately held MobiTV has already started to deliver video clips to Cingular and Sprint mobile phones.

Cingular Wireless is planning to charge around $6.99 a month for the MobiRadio service, plus airtime charges. Their competitors Sprint Nextel are also in this market and launched a similar service in mid-September using channels from Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. They charge around $7 a month plus airtime charges. Looks like Apple would have more reasons to launch something like an iPhone soon enough to enter this interesting market of mobile phones capable of doing more than just handling calls and messages.