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Omnifone has also signed content deals three other major music groups: Sony/BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI Group.

A new music service named MusicStation, which will be suitable for 75 percent of mobile handsets available on the market that allows consumers to directly download an unlimited number of tracks to their cell phones for a small weekly fee from wherever they are will launch in Europe on Thursday.

Omnifone said the service would be available on all 2.5G and 3G music compatible cell phones, which currently accounts for approximately 80 percent of the handsets sold in Western Europe.

It will offer unlimited track downloads at 4 U.S. dollars a week, 2.99 euros, or 1.99 pounds in Britain, which includes data traffic charges.

Omnifone Chief Executive Rob Lewis told Reutersit would take between one and 15 seconds to download a track and that phones could store between 100 and a few thousand depending on the phone.

British firm Omnifone said it had signed content deals with the four biggest music groups in the industry and had agreements with 30 mobile operators in a bid to get a jump onthe much-hyped iPhone made by iPod maker Apple. It will launch first in Sweden on Thursday with Scandinavian operator Telenor.

MusicStation will then roll out across Europe, the Asia-Pacific and Africa in the coming days and weeks. Omnifone is targeting 100 million phones in a year and can offer over 1 million songs.

“It’s hard to imagine a more compelling music experience on mobile than MusicStation,” Rob Wells, of Universal Music Group’s digital division said. “It works on almost any phone, giving consumers the freedom to choose whatever device they want (and) it allows downloads wherever those consumers are.

iMini Pet iPod players from Ozaki are on display at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show. The iMini Pet is an iPod dock, a radio and an alarm clock with a stuffed pet on top that moves and ?dances? and “sings” as music is being played. (AFP/Robyn Beck)

– Jelfin, a colorful ball-shaped gel-covered mouse from an Arizona-based company of the same name. “It’s funky, it’s fun, it’s 34.95 dollars,” said Pamela North, a Jelfin spokeswoman.

– Mint, a cleaning robot from California-based Evolution Robotics which uses light sensor feedback to move around obstacles and get into corners. The square-shaped Mint, which costs 250 dollars, dusts or mops hardwood or tile floors and is seen as a complement to iRobot’s disk-shaped Roomba carpet vacuum cleaner. “We think people will want both,” said Evolution’s Teresa Bridwell.

– Summit Series ski goggles featuring a built-in still and video camera from Liquid Image, a California company which made a splash at CES last year with their camera-equipped scuba diving masks. The goggles debut in June and will cost 150 dollars.

– Digital Art Frame from Casio. It transforms digital pictures into virtual oil paintings, pastels, or water colors. It will be available by mid-year. The price was not disclosed. Another digital picture frame, the Frame Wizard, from FaceCake Marketing Technologies of Calabasas, California, can animate family photos like images in Harry Potter books. “Your face can be moving, you can be smiling,” said FaceCake CEO Linda Smith. “You can have leaves or snow falling.” An eight-inch (20-centimeter) frame costs 199 dollars while the 15-inch (30-cm) model sells for 299 dollars.

– AR.drone, a flying saucer-like drone from French company Parrot which is piloted using an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch through a Wi-Fi connection. The drone also has a camera that streams live video. It’s the first product of its kind from Parrot, which specializes in hands-free wireless systems for drivers. No price has been set.

– Nite Dawg Light-Up dog collars and leashes from Boulder, Colorado-based Nite Ize Innovation feature an LED light sewn into the material. “It’s a fun product but manufactured for safety.” said Nite Ize’s Bill Kuntz. They each sell for 17.50 dollars.

– the MagicJack, a controversial product from Florida company YMax which uses radio frequencies to make free Internet phone calls from inside the home by acting like a personal cell tower. The problem? The 40-dollar device uses radio spectrum without a bona fide license and the major cellular carriers pay billions of dollars for the privilege. Ymax insists it is not breaking any laws but a fight is looming.

– Dash, a “personal Internet viewer” from Sony, has a 7-inch (18-cm) screen and sits on a nightstand or table top like a clock radio. It can display films, news, weather, social networks or other online content. The Dash will cost 200 dollars when it launches in the United States in a few months.

– cellphone accessories, particularly for Apple’s iPhone, are ubiquitous at CES. Some of the most notable: crystal-studded “Luxmo” iPhone cases from DreamWireless costing between 350 and 450 dollars. On the other end of the spectrum, iWaveAudio.com offers an “eco-friendly line” of iPhone covers made from wood and hemp for between 20 and 30 dollars.

Cutting-edge technology grabbed the headlines at the premier US gadget show here but the showrooms also featured products better described as useful, useless and downright unusual.

Sharing space in the cavernous halls at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with snazzy new electronic readers, tablet computers and 3-D televisions were scores of other items — both high- and low-tech.

Here is a glance at some of the most innovative, fun and eye-catching products on display at the Las Vegas Convention Center:

– Samsung’s “All-in-Premium Remote,” a TV remote control from the South Korean company, features a built-in screen allowing you to go fix a sandwich or answer a call of nature without missing any action. It will come out later this year with Samsung’s new 9000 series high-definition TVs.

– ZOMM, a wireless leash for a mobile phone from an Oklahoma-based company of the same name. The device about the size of a poker chip attaches to a keychain or clothing and vibrates, flashes a light and emits an alarm when you walk out of Bluetooth range. ZOMM, which retails for 80 dollars, was a winner of a CES 2010 “Best of Innovations” Award.

– SHOWWX Laser Pico Projector from Microvision, a pocket-size device that can connect to mobile phones, portable media players or computers and uses lasers to project a high-quality wide-screen image on any surface. A winner of the “Last Gadget Standing” competition at CES it will go on sale later this year for 500 dollars.

– Boxee Box from D-Link, a set-top box that streams content from the Web to a TV without the need of a computer. The Boxee Box, which shared “Last Gadget Standing” honors with the SHOWWX projector, is to be available later this year for around 200 dollars.

– MicroVision Optical sunglasses described as the first which can also be used to watch 3-D movies or 3-D TV. With more 3-D entertainment coming out, the glasses “should be a permanent addition to your eyewear collection,” said David Johnson, president of the San Diego, California-based company. They come in various styles selling for between 32 dollars and 40 dollars.

– MusicCap from Israeli company Walletex, a baseball cap which features an MP3 player embedded in the bill and dangling earbuds. “It’s waterproof so you can surf, ski, run, jog, fish, do any outdoor activity with your cap on your head and music in your ears,” said product manager Max Fleischer. It costs between 50 and 60 dollars and comes with up to eight gigabytes of memory.

Flash memory chips have solid state circuitry that uses no moving parts, making them less vulnerable to damage than hard-disk drives. Prices of flash memory have been declining rapidly but are still higher than those for hard-disk drives, Wu said, meaning early flash-based computers would be more expensive.

Apple Inc. is looking to eliminate lengthy start-up times by introducing notebook computers later this year that use the same type of fast memory as music players and digital cameras, an analyst said Thursday.

Apple would use a miniature version of its Mac OS X operating system in the flash-based subnotebook computers, Wu said, again citing unnamed sources. The computers could be introduced in the second half of this year, he said.

Shaw Wu, at American Technology Research, said the flash memory in small computers known as subnotebooks will also drive down the prices of hard-disk drives, according to reports.

Apple already uses flash memory in its iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle music players. Flash memory is lighter, uses less power and takes up less space than hard-disk drives.

Wu, who was among the first analysts to forecast the unveiling of Apple’s iPhone music player/phone earlier this year, cited unnamed industry sources as the basis for his report.

“The time is right for the flash makers to make a move” as flash memory prices decline, Wu said by telephone. “Apple, from what we understand, is pretty much ready. The ball is in the flash vendors’ court.”

Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox said the company does not comment “on rumor and speculation.”

Apple, known as a technology innovator, would be among the first personal computer makers to use flash memory for storing data in computers, a step that some chip memory makers, including Micron Technology Inc., have said is inevitable as prices for flash decline and storage capacity increases.

Nokia to beef up venture fund, expand in ChinaMenlo Park, Calif.-based Nokia Growth Partners was set up in 2004 to directly manage $100 million of Nokia’s money. Its investments have included Bitboys, a Finnish developer of graphics chips that was bought by ATI in 2006 for $44.5 million, and Global Locate, a U.S. maker of GPS chips that was bought by Broadcom Corp. for at least $146 million last year.

Qualcomm Inc. has a venture fund with a broad portfolio, much like Nokia Growth Partners. Research in Motion Ltd., which makes the BlackBerry, announced in May that it had set up a $150 million fund with outside partners to invest in companies creating software for BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. In March, Apple Inc. said it would set up a $100 million “iFund” for the development of iPhone and iPod Touch applications.

Nokia Corp. is more than doubling the size of its direct venture investment fund with an injection of $150 million, with a view to putting some of the money to use in India and China.

“We’ve been investing in companies globally, but we need to get even more feet on the ground in China and India,” said Rick Simonson, Nokia’s chief financial officer.

We’ve had very good success with this model early on,” Simonson said. “The financial performance is working as well or better than we expected.”

Apart from seeking a financial return, the fund hunts for startups with technologies that are useful to Nokia. Some areas of focus have included mobile payments and camera technology.

Venture funds have become a standard accessory for companies in the cell phone arena, though the approaches vary

Apple Corps has historically shunned releasing Beatles’ music in digital formats because of concerns about piracy.

A version of the videogame customized for iPhones and iPod Touch devices will debut with songs from bands including Smashing Pumpkins, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Foo Fighters, and Blink-182, according to EA Mobile.

Music videogame star “Rock Band” will soon be touring with Apple’s globally popular iPhones.

US videogame titan Electronic Arts (EA) on Friday was inviting “Rock Band” lovers to take their acts on the road with a version of the title expected to be available by month’s end at Apple’s online App Store.

“Start out playing in grungy dives and work all the way up to stadium-rock stardom,” EA Mobile said at its website.

In a variation on how the videogame is played on consoles, colored buttons will stream along on-screen guitar necks, with players staying in tune by tapping matching spots pictured on touchscreens.

EA Mobile has taken advantage of wireless Bluetooth capabilities in the Apple devices to let as many as three people play together as a virtual band using their iPhones.

People can also play solo.

“Rock Band” made its debut in the smartphone arena last month with a version customized for customers of US telecom carrier Verizon.

A version of “Rock Band” devoted to The Beatles was released for play on videogame consoles last month but it remained a mystery whether the music of the Fab Four will eventually join EA’s mobile offerings.

Some auditory hallucinations are normal. On falling asleep and waking up, it is fairly common to think youˇve heard your name called, or less specific noises, Woodruff says.

Brain scans of people experiencing musical hallucinations show that neural activity is identical to the state of really hearing the music.¨Itˇs not like having a tune going around in your head,〃 said Adrian Rees, an expert in auditory neurology at Newcastle University.¨This is something you canˇt turn off or change to another record.〃

Can iPods make you hallucinate? If you like your answers based on proof, then this particular one has to be a firm¨no.〃 But the issue was raised this week by Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff, Britain, and expert in so-called musical hallucinations.

Just like the more familiar visual variants, musical hallucinations strike suddenly.¨People will all of a sudden start hearing a song, such as Yes, We Have No Bananas,〃 says Aziz.

Musical hallucinations are rare and usually linked to some kind of abnormal behavior in the brain, be it a psychiatric condition, epilepsy or a tumor. But Aziz says people are more likely to experience them if they go from hearing a lot of music to a quiet place in which their brains receive little auditory stimulus.

In research reported this week, Aziz studied people aged 65 to 90 and documented any experiences of musical hallucinations. Traditionally, scientists thought that hallucinations were more common among those who listened to a lot of music in childhood, but Aziz found that many of his patients were hearing more recent songs.

Aziz believes that in the iPod age, the increase in the amount of music we are exposed to will make hallucinations more common.¨We are now exposed to a barrage of music and it seems that we might well see more cases of this in the future,〃 he said.¨Weˇll only know if we test people in 20 yearsˇ time,〃 he added.

Ironically, iPods and Walkmans are used by many patients who experience intrusive musical hallucinations, says Peter Woodruff, a psychiatrist at Sheffield University.¨What they find is that by playing real music, it competes with the hallucination and suppresses it,〃 he says.

Sources say the device could be launched as early as next month. It would follow the recent United States launch of the Sony eBook Reader, a machine the size of a hardback that stores digital copies of up to 80 books and lasts 7,500 pages on a single charge.

Online bookseller Amazon intends to unveil a wireless electronic book reader — think of it as a literary iPod — that has United Kingdom publishers in a frenzy to digitize their entire range of titles.

Amazon is currently keeping its electronic book, believed to be named “Kindle” and priced at more than 400 U.S. dollars a secret and refused to comment on its existence. But U.S. industry sources are predicting an October launch for a device that could do for reading what the iPod did for mobile music.

“With Amazon and Sony both reported to be planning electronic book reader launches in the UK, we are highly positive about the market for digital books,” said Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital director of Penguin.”

A source close to Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter novels, said the company was also keen to adapt literary works to the new technology.

Ettinghausen said the public’s appetite for digital content, coupled with a wireless electronic book, will allow booksellers to offer instant digital downloads of all types of literature in cafｅs, airports and, of course, in bookshops. Penguin has begun the process of digitizing all its books and already offers a limited selection of digital downloads from its website.

Although transferring content into electronic format has resulted in heavy losses for record labels as a result of widespread piracy, Ettinghausen is confident that electronic books will not replace the paper variety but will whet the public’s appetite for reading.

He said paper books have an intrinsic appeal to their owners and also cites the way in which the start of Amazon’s Internet sales service in the 1990s preceded the opening of huge new London bookstores such as Borders in Oxford Street and Waterstones in Piccadilly. Industry predictions at the time had been that internet sales would force high street bookstores to close.