Posted on June 17, 2008, at 11:34 am .
After stumbling on a story about a recent Sony acquisition, I learned about Gracenote, which does a lot of work with digital music files, and apparently plays nice with BlackBerry. Back in the day I used to use Winamp which used Gracenote’s CDDB system to gather up information like album and genre to tack onto my files. You might remember hearing about Sony Ericsson’s TrackID program, which recognizes music that you just hold your phone close to, and is clearly powered by Gracenote. iTunes will be a great converging point for Gracenote and the BlackBerry Bold, but I’m really hopeful to see the other services Gracenote offers, like lyrics lookup, music discovery, and handsfree music navigation. Around CES time, it sounded like RIM was being troublesome about getting the service onto BlackBerrys, but I think it’s safe to say everyone would love to have this software preloaded on every device.
Posted on March 12, 2008, at 7:19 am .
There’s a new music store coming from Puretracks on April 1st. called Puretracks Mobile Edition, which will offer 64kbs AAC music without any DRM whatsoever. The AAC format they’re using gets roughly twice the quality at half the size of MP3, so the music will be approximately the equivalent of a 128kbs MP3. Not enough for audiophiles, perhaps, but probably good enough for the rest of us. There’s no indication of pricing yet, but they did say they’ll be releasing Wi-Fi capability for the service later on.
Posted on June 29, 2007, at 8:58 am .
Between today’s iPhone release à la Second Coming and a predictably stellar Q1 performance review by RIM, finding fresh news this morning has been tough. With some diligent forum lurking though, we’ve got a juicy tidbit from Pinstack’s hayden. Word has it a Wi-Fi capable BlackBerry 8320 will be hitting the streets in September on T-Mobile and packing a 3.2 megapixel camera akin to the rumored Pearl 2’s.
Main features include…
