Robbie Williams: crooning soon on a phone near you

Record label EMI will release Robbie Williams' Greatest Hits on mobe and PDA-compatible Multimedia Memory Card (MMC) memory card from next month. Pundits say it's the first time that music has been made available in this format. The album will come with video content and will be on sale at 600 Carphone Warehouse stores in the UK for £29.99.

EMI has plans to deliver more pre-loaded memory cards this Christmas. Kevin Gillan, Carphone Warehouse's director of group business development, told BBC News: "We see pre-loaded music memory cards as the next step and part of a general consumer hunger for more mobile content."

Mobile phones are inreasingly becoming viable alternatives to portable MP3 players, many now equiped with stereo-quality sound systems and ever-expanding storage space. Last month, Samsung's SPH-V5400 handset - the first phone to be equiped with a hard drive - hit the streets.

Some analysts believe the mobile phone with hard disc capacity could revolutionize the MP3 player market just as the camera phone did for the photography world.

"There's no reason to think we won't have a five-gigabyte hard drive on the market next year," Hubert Gertis, a technology analyst for Berlin-based consultancy Gertis Media, told Reuters. He added that top-of-the-line mobile phones could have hard drive capacity of 400GB by 2007 - 10 times the capacity of Apple's top-end iPod which can currently handle 10,000 songs. ®

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