The new service will be launched this weekend on Saturday 15th March, and will compete with Vodafone’s MusicStation, and Nokia’s Music Store which were both launched in quarter four last year. The service will be available on the O2 active portal and will only be available on selected handsets at first, with the number of compatible handsets set to increase in the near future.

A promotional price of 99p per track or £4 for five tracks has been set. This price includes two copies of your selected song, with one copy going to your mobile phone and the other copy being emailed to you, to enable you to store the track on your computer. The price of the service after the three month promotional period is unknown. Nokia’s Music Store charges 80p for a single track and £8 for an entire album, and Vodafone charge 99p per track or £5. 99 per album or you can sign up to MusicStation which has a weekly subscription of £1. 99, but allows the user to download unlimited music tracks.

O2 claim that Napster’s music catalogue of over 5 million songs is the largest of all the other rival mobile music services. Whichever service you choose your mobile phone will be making sweet mobile music!

The service will give customers a special service portal with access to real time billing information on their mobile phone, so that they can keep track of their inclusive allowances and money much better. This customer service portal will also provide information and tutorials on mobile services, such as downloading music, mobile internet or how to send a picture message.

The customer service portal should hopefully reduce the number of calls to the normal customer service for this type of query, and as long as it is free it should prove to be very popular.

The service will be rolled out to open OS phones this year (including S60 and Microsoft Windows Mobile), but Vodafone have promised that this new form of customer service will not come at the expense of the traditional customer services.

Three are backing this all the way, and O2 have announced that they will be introducing the two day porting two weeks earlier than the regulatory required date of the 31st March. T-Mobiles views are not yet known, but Vodafone and Orange are against the change in porting time.

Vodafone have appealed to the CAT (Competition Appeals Tribunal) against Ofcoms porting proposals, there argument being that quicker porting will increase cases of mobile phone ‘slamming’. This issue could be easily resolved if the network contacted the customer (via text) who had requested the number port, stating the date the port will go through and asking the customer to contact the network ASAP if they did not request for this to be done.

In Ireland numbers are ported within a maximum of two hours, and RegCom (Ireland’s regulatory body) are not aware of any surges in ‘slamming’ cases. Surprisingly Vodafone should already know this as they have a 45% share of customers in Ireland.

Vodafone also claim that the central database that will need to be created for the number ports to go through within two days will cost ten times more that the £12 million that Ofcom have estimated.

The case will be held on the 5th March, any networks that also want to intervene will have to intervene quickly as they only have until the 29th February to do so. Orange intend to formally register their interests with the CAT and BT haven’t ruled out intervening as Vodafone are BT’s MVNO partner.

Both the mobiles are low cost basic types, so presumably Vodafone are aiming for the pre-pay market. The Vodafone 227 and 228 are due for release as early as this month, but will most likely be heavily promoted on PAYG simply because they are more basic phones. They have not been added to Vodafone’s site yet so there is no word on price yet

The Vodafone V227 is a flip phone, and the 228 is a slide phone – both have colour displays, vibrating alerts and will come with simple to use headsets. So no fancy camera’s, GPS or Wi-Fi – just a nice neat phone that makes calls and messages!

Not really much else to report about as they really are that basic – but there is definitely a market for the simpler and low cost mobile phones.

MySpace. com also a highly popular social networking website has been available on Vodafone Live for a while and Vodafone customers were getting inpatient waiting for Facebook to become available too.

Anyone who’s anybody seems to be on Facebook now-a-days, and the fact that Vodafone customers couldn’t access their favourite website was very frustrating. But do not fear Vodafone customers you can now access Facebook from your mobile phone. Vodafone Live subscribers can now update their profiles, browse other people’s profiles and chat on their mobile phone. You can upload videos and pictures through Vodafone’s My Communities site.

Vodafone have also launched a dating service in conjunction with Match. com, giving users the ability to register for free and browse potential partners. Further features are available for a £3 per month subscription.