Erica Ogg over on C/Net News.com says that SlingMedia is working hard to develop technology that would allow Apple TV users to stream your iTunes tracks to your mobile via their SlingBox device. Since SlingMedia sells a piece of software called SlingPlayer that works on Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian, it should be a pretty nifty solution for those with smart phones.
Now this sounds unusually hard and complex, and might have an appeal for those with D.I.Y. tendencies. I prefer the simplicity of iPod over listening to tunes on my mobile phone, mostly because I want to save the battery for talking. Now if you insist on listening to music on your phone, there are far simpler and less complicated solutions out on the market, which are not bad for the price - about $15 a month.
For instance, Real Networks’ Rhapsody service. The only problem is that it works on Nokia N95, N91 and N800 devices. The monthly subscription service allows you to load music of your choice to any of these three devices. We tried it on the N95 and N800 and it worked as advertised, though we had to use a Windows PC. All we had to do was follow Darla Mack’s instructions. Rhapsody doesn’t work with Mac OS X based computers. (Nokia 800 users get the first month free of Rhapsody service that costs $15 a month.)
Support for more devices is coming. It would be ideal to have this work with the N73, which in our humble opinion is the best Nokia music phone. A tip for Real: support Sony Ericsson and Samsung as soon as possible, or cede market to Yahoo Music or Napster, which has partnered with AT&T (Wireless) for mobile music services.
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3:08 AM PT
[...] popular SlingBox for beaming your audio and visual content around the house and around the world, is looking to stream content to the Apple TV, CEO Blake Krikorian asserted in a panel that they are also looking to stream content to the iPhone [...]
6 comments so far
2:17 AM PT
I’m not sure that an AppleTV user would want a slingbox as well, maybe I’m wrong.
Another piece of interesting mobile software is The Filter, that can fill your phone with recommended music and then using The Filter software can create playlists on the move.
2:48 AM PT
I recently saw that Pocket Tunes, the leading software jukebox for the Palm OS, supposedly supports Rhapsody files.
I have been using Pocket Tunes to stream online radio stations on my Treo as well as to play tracks stored on my SD card already. That works perfectly so I am thinking the Rhapsody support shouldn’t be hard for them.
My question is why doesn’t the Real Player jukebox software that comes pre-installed on Treos come with Rhapsody support? If a third party can do it why can’t Real? It seems like they are missing a nice opportunity by not promoting Rhapsody + Treo’s music playing capabilities.
7:30 AM PT
I bought an Audiovox phone a couple of years ago and while the software leaves a lot to be desired, it’s awesome for using it as a portable music player. It is a battery hog, but it’s easy enough to keep charged up. The only real advantage to using Sling instead of mp3’s is that you could get all of your music collection instead of what you can stuff on a 2GB chip, but this seems like such a small benefit for the price. If you were going to buy a sling anyway, this is a nice feature, but I don’t think it would motivate me to spend a couple hundred on this sort of device, just to get streaming mp3’s to my phone.
8:25 AM PT
WM5 device + 2gb MiniSD card + bluetooth headphones = awesome. I don’t forsee me having a need to stream my existing music collection (>12k songs, 120gb) to my mobile device.
7:55 PM PT
I have an LG phone with VZ service and its great.. dont see why I need streaming service.
A Napster like service on VZ may be more interesting!
5:36 AM PT
Slingplayer for Symbian!? Nope…I must’ve missed that meeting. Unless you are: 1) in the UK and 2) using “3″ on one of about 2 Nokia handsets, it is safe to say that there is absolutely NO Symbian SlingPlayer…still!!
Boo hoo.
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