AT&T and Samsung joined forces to provide a Napster enabled mobile phone just in time for the holidays.

Dubbed the SLM, the phone will let users search from Napster’s music library of 5 million+ songs, and download the songs directly to the mobile phone. Single songs can be purchased for $1.99 each using the service, or 5 tracks per month are available at $7.49 per month.

There is much more to these phones that just the Napster service, including mobile banking, XM Radio Mobile, and bluetooth capability, more. Read the story here.

Thinking of getting someone a cell phone as a gift for Christmas or Hanukkah this year, but not sure what’s popular? There are quite a few models to choose from, and it’s not easy to tell which phones are hot and which are last years news. To offer a little help, we thought we’d offer up the cell phone models getting the most buzz so far in 2007 (yes, we’ve included the iPhone).

But we want your opinion. What cell phone model would you like to receive as a holiday gift this year? Cast your vote below!

JiWire, the folks that have brought you the public Wifi directory, recently launched a mobile version specifically optimized for the iPhone.

The service automatically detects the iPhone device, and formats the interface accordingly. iPhone users only need to browse over to www.jiwire.com, or you can preview the iPhone-optimized version right from your desktop here.

Enjoy!

Mobile Website:

http://iphone.jiwire.com

Note: Image above courtesy of JiWire.com

Or “iDay”, as they called it in Boston last night, as several gadget enthusiasts waited in line for today’s 6pm ET launch of the Apple iPhone. And so it was around the country, and around the web, as the iPhone hype came to a fever pitch rarely seen for a single product.

After several rumors about stores setting a limit of one iPhone per person, Apple officially announced they would allow buyers to purchase up to two iPhones each. Steve Jobs also announced today that every Apple employee would receive a free iPhone. No word yet on whether Jobs and friends are also picking up the tab for the AT&T service plan.

Here is a roundup of the coverage of the insanity about the new Apple iPhone:
(Mouseover links for a preview)

TechCrunch: The Do it Yourself iPhone
News.com: iPhone: The wait is over
Lifehacker: Top 10 iPhone Applications
engadget: Up to the Minute iPhone Coverage
Flickr: All Pictures Tagged iPhone

I don’t know about you, but I am getting close to iPhone buzz overload, and the product is still 2 months away from general availability. If you crave more iPhone goodness, Apple has set up an email notification page to receive the latest iPhone news and updates (again, about a product that you cannot buy yet).
Of course, I signed up anyway. (I cannot wait to see how many new mobile apps it will bring…)

(Image courtesy of Apple.com)

If you still carry around a checkbook, we here at MobileMammoth have only one question for you. Why?

Mobile Banking is Here

With the recent announcements of mobile banking services from Cingular Wireless and Citibank, you now have absolutely no valid reason to tote around an actual checkbook with actual paper checks.

Cingular announced major mobile banking partnerships with four large financial institutions last month, which included Wachovia, SunTrust, BancorpSouth, and Regions Financial. Citibank’s announcement yesterday offered a new mobile banking service, dubbed Citi Mobile. Citibank’s service, which will allow users to check balances, transfer funds, and pay bills, is currently available in select U.S. markets, including Southern California, and is scheduled to be rolled out to the rest of the country by late summer 2007.

Below is an excerpt from the Citi Mobile FAQ page:

What is Citi Mobile?

Citi MobileSM is a convenient, secure, and easy-to-use service that lets you do your day-to-day banking on your mobile phone. You can use it to pay bills, transfer money, see your balances and activity, find a Financial Center or ATM and connect directly to Customer Service—right from your cell phone.

Designed for customers on-the-go, Citi Mobile is the first downloadable mobile banking service offered by a major bank in the U.S. Citi Mobile has been designed to work on a wide range of phones across several U.S. wireless carriers. Citi will be actively adding more cell phone models over the next few months.

Balance Your iPhone

While neither of these services will let you pay for items using your cell phone, PDA, or iPhone mobile device just yet, it will. You already know that most stores in semi-metro areas will accept a debit/credit card for payment. Now if you’re wondering what your account balance is before you make that $300 debit, just fire up the new Citi Mobile app on your iPhone mobile phone. (What, you don’t have yours yet?)

Checkbooks are so 2002. Get with the program.

Editor’s note: We goofed! Our readers correctly pointed out that the Citi Mobile app does NOT work on the iPhone, as some of you have seen in the comments. We have corrected the mistake in the post. We are sorry for the confusion, and thank you again to our readers who helped correct that information for everyone!

With this same spirit in mind, we at MobileMammoth.com theorized on what just might be the top 10 Google Maps searches Bush would make on “The Mobile Google” from his cell phone. Here is our best guess:

1. “where my phone”
2. “find osama”
3. “Who was Reagan’s Vice President”
4. “laura’s brasiere strap”
5. “The Ranch”
6. “East Korea”
7. “1600 pencilvania road”
8. “are my daughters sober?”
9. “weapons of math construction”
10. “strategery”

What other mobile searches might our oh-so-savvy President make? Post a comment with your favorite!

March Madness is upon us, and if you haven’t used any of the mobile score alert services yet, now is a great time to start.


We posted a recent article on getting Super Bowl Scores on your cell phone, and many of the services mentioned there also provide NCAA basketball score alerts.

Update: We Found a Free Option for Sports Alerts!

While the CSTV service described below does an excellent job, it does cost money. And who wants to pay?

So we dug deeper and found a free, yet very reliable, mobile sports alert service from 4INFO. They have a simple demo of their service here. As you’ll see on their site when signing up, they have an interesting mobile alert service for the NCAA tournament this year. You can select to receive updates from your favorite team, or select the “Tournament Pass” option.

Single Team:

Select your conference, then your team, and elect to receive scores at different game intervals. It also includes an Update Trigger, which provides an update in the last few minutes of the game that it considers to be a potential upset.

Tournament Pass:

This option includes an upset alert, as well as an updated final score at the end of each remaining NCAA game. A great way to follow your standings in your tournament pool.

Again, the only cost comes from your carrier’s text messaging fees. So test it out on the remaining NCAA tournament games and let us know how it stacks up.

(OK, now back to the paid option that we originally wrote about…)

Best Premium (Paid) Option for NCAA Mobile Alerts

However, the one service that offers the most cell phone alerts for all college sports is CSTV. I started using CSTV to follow my alma mater and a few other schools in 2004, and I consistently received the halftime and final scores of those games via a text message within about 10 minutes. This was using a Sprint cell phone plan on an LG phone.

CSTV’s mobile score alert service supports the following carriers: Alltel, Boost, Cingular, Dobson, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and US Cellular. Of course, confirm that your cell phone plan includes text messaging (SMS).

The service costs $3.99 per month, and provides about 10 messages per month,
depending on the settings you set.

Try it out for March to follow the 2007 NCAA Basketball tournament this year, then let us know what you think! Did you get the NCAA scores on time? Would you use it again?

Yes, the new Apple iPhone is slick. And few can create as much buzz around a new product announcement as Steve Jobs. But what I find most significant about the introduction of the iPhone at Macworld 2007 this week is that it will propel US cell phone users into the world of mobile web apps. Here’s why.

The number of wireless customers that actually use the web browsing capabilities on their cell phones remains low in the US, particularly compared to other countries. There have been many reasons for this — mobile web browsing is too slow, most content providers still do not serve mobile-friendly versions of their sites, and users are often not sure if their subscritpion plan will charge extra for mobile browsing. All of these factors are slowly fading away, as even some of the carriers are just beginning to offer flat rates for mobile web access.

First, as has been reported on countless sites and blogs, the iPhone web browsing capabilities appear to leapfrog the other models that exist today. Here is the excerpt from an artilce at Silicon.com:

The iPhone also comes loaded with Apple’s Safari web browser and fully incorporates Google’s search and mapping services. Users can make phone calls directly from Google Maps. Phone service in the US will be provided exclusively by Cingular Wireless.

Of course, we have yet to actually use the iPhone, since it’s not due until June. And we do not yet have details on the web browsing pricing from Cingular, which has an exclusive license to be the sole carrier for at least the next two years. Something tells me that it’s all laid out in the agreement with Apple, and that can only be a good thing.

Hold on to your iPhones folks, this is going to be fun.

The mobile video announcements just keep coming. Now Cingular wireless customers will be able to watch Saturday Night Live (SNL) video snippets on their cell phones.

According to the press release, this offering requires the Cingular Video service, which is currently available on Cingular’s Media Net Unlimited package. The Media Net package costs $19.99 per month, and the SNL deal will offer access to over 100 old and new SNL clips, as well as mobile-only content that was recently developed.
This follows news earlier this week that Cingular will offer MySpace mobile content to their subscribers as well. MySpace mobile services had previously only been available through youth-oriented mobile carrier Helio.

Of all the cell phone app categories out there, mobile video is clearly among the fastest growing. While the carriers continue to control the content gates, it is just a matter of time before one of the operators lowers data access rates and throws open the doors to the mobile web.