(2 January 2008 2:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Spreadtrum, Amoi and Kuro have announced China's first solution for music phones offering copyrighted music, as Amoi unveiled its new music phones, A616 and A636 in the beginning of the new year.

This solution is specifically designed for the growing mobile music market, and not only brings high quality copyright protected music to Chinese mobile handset users, but also pushes domestic music phones' industrial chain to the convergence of the '4Cs' -- Communication, Chip, Content and Copyright.

With mobile music growing in popularity, music optimised phones are becoming favored by consumers as the main carrier of the mobile music. Nevertheless, continued poor quality of video and audio, copyright restriction of video resources, and lack of music choices have been a limitation to the quick growth of mobile music phones.

To date, there are few choices of copyrighted music services at a reasonable price in the Chinese consumer market. Meanwhile, chipset makers, handset manufacturers, and mobile music carriers look to combine music playback functions with high quality sound and large music storage to bring the consumers richer music experiences.

Kuro is a music service provider legally authourised by most record companies for millions of online copyrighted songs, providing high quality music download services. Through the cooperation, Spreadtrum has embedded Kuro's services into its chipset platform so that the mobile phones equipped with Spreadtrum's chips can enable the functions of a multimedia player and online music download services.

Amoi firstly deployed this combination of new functions and download service, and plans to launch its new music phone in the near future. Consistent with its research concept 'To be the pioneer of application, to be delicate as much as we can'. Amoi's music phone enables consumers to listen to and download copyrighted music. At the same time, it is a karaoke music phone with high quality original music and celebrity photographs. With the portable music, people can learn to sing songs and become a karaoke singer.

Spreadtrum president and CEO Dr. Ping Wu said, "We are very delighted about this cooperation. As one of China's leading wireless baseband chipset providers, Spreadtrum is devoted to the evolution of the wireless communication and multimedia handsets. Spreadtrum's product range includes baseband chipsets for 2G, 2.5G, 3G and 3.5G handsets, specialized software, handset development platform, and AVS audio/video decoder chips.

"Embedding Kuro's music copyright protection technology into Spreadtrum's SC6600R platform, a high quality multimedia baseband chipset, the Amoi's mobile phones using Spreadtrum's solution should be able to satisfy consumers' varied but growing levels of demand for copyrighted music. We believe that this solution enhances the performance and competitiveness of China's domestic music phones."

Amoi VP Huang Aiping says, "As a leading domestic handset manufacturer, Amoi aims to be an outstanding provider for the music market segment of handsets. It always stands in the front line of the tide of music handsets. From monosyllabic times to the polyphonic era, Amoi has developed a series of products focusing on the consumer's growing demands, and strives to introduce outstanding products which can bring richer musical experiences to consumers."

iPeer Multimedia International president Zheng Qicheng says, "Beijing Kuro Times is the partner of iPeer Multimedia International Ltd. in China. It has the current leading platform
for domestic online digital music services. Kuro has not only pushed the development of digital music by linking the industry together, but also strives to cross different areas, launching innovative services that integrate original music, star pictorials, and karaoke with verbatim lyrics, using Spreadtrum and Amoi features.

" Kuro also believes it strengthens the additional value of Amoi handsets through the enabling of intelligent song recommendations and community links. In the future, besides music-based handsets, the products with 'Kuro Inside' service are expected to include MP3, MPEG4, digital photo frames, U-disk, PC, notebooks and other consumer devices. We hope to bring a better quality of service and provide a new mode to all the Chinese hardware manufacturers, providing these partners with more competitive edges and product values."