The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Cingular will launch a new music service as early as tomorrow.  According to the report:

Cingular Wireless is expected to offer new cellphones that double as music players in partnership with some of the biggest online music services, including Napster Inc., Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Music and eMusic, people familiar with the matter said, and is preparing to launch a full-scale wireless music service next year.

Cingular’s service initially will support transferring music from personal computers to cellphones using a special cable. In a first for music-enabled cellphones, users will be able to transfer to their phones music acquired from “all you can eat” subscription services like Napster to Go, Yahoo’s Y Music Unlimited, or eMusic.

The WSJ also reports that uses will be able to transfer songs ripped from CDs or
downloaded in the MP3 and Windows Media formats. in addition, Cingular is expected to roll out an over the air verision of a virtual music store, much like its current ringtone store.

The surpising thing about the report is the absence of Apple iTunes as a partner in this effort.  Apple and Cingular have long been rumored to be potential partners in a cell music play.

What Cingular is doing is in line the the trend to upgrade mobile phones to compete with iPods and other media playing devices. However, it appears to be a evolutionary, rather than revolutionary step towards the convergence of ipods and phones.  The ability to connect to subscription services is a big plus for those of us that pay for music, but that may not be the key demographic that is needed to compete with the iPod.

The ease with which people can connect and transfer music from their PCs will be a key factor in the success of this service with the key demographic that needs to adopt - teens and college kids. This demographic doesn’t like to buy music, they get it from their friends. The ability to copy the mp3’s, drag them into iTunes and the
sync to the iPod is super easy - making it a favorite for the kids.   Cingular will need to be able to compete on this dimension to have a real chance against iPod.

Cell phone services should be pushing wifi enabled phones like the Nokia N91 series if they really wants to compete with iPods.

I have a Nokia N91 phone from Europe that Nokia was kind enough to give me in exchange for allowing Nokia to build my podcast search service into the phone. This phone has about the same storage capacity as the Apple Nano and within 5 years will have 40gb flash drive that puts it on par with the high end iPod.

The major difference is that this phone connects to a computer network via wifi and that means it can connect to network just like any computer does without cell phone charges.  With this type of phone, I can connect to a wifi network and share whatever there is to share. That’s what the teens want, and that’s what it will take to
beat iPod.

Phones like this will drop in price point and will become widespread within 3 to 5 years.  Apple better figure out how it get infront of that trend if it wants to stay the market leader.