Chiltern Railways are piloting a scheme that will allow passengers to purchase tickets on their mobile phones.

The new system being piloted by fifty passengers allows users to use their mobile phones to purchase a ticket. After completeing the purchase the ticket is sent to their phone in the form of a barcode that can be read by the electronic gates.

This will only work on more modern phones with colour screens,  Chiltern have had a service in place since January that allowed users to send tickets to their mobile phone, with the addition of the ability to purchase they have taken the complete process to users on the move.

Anyone who has stood in a ten deep queue at a railway station will appreciate this service.

Read the press release here

At the 2007 Global Mobile awards in Barcelona Samsung and Sony Ericsson picked up the awards. The competition had two categories "Best GSM handset" and "Best 3GSM handset", the SGH-D900 won in the first category whilst the Sony Ericsson K800 Cyber-Shot ™ phone won the latter.

Samsung SHG-D900 - Won Category "Best GSM Handset"

Sony Ericson K800 - Won Category "Best 3GSM Handset"

"T-Mobile has cut by more than half charges for business customers who transmit data over its mobile networks in countries where it operates its own network." (from the reg)

If you are on a T-mobile business tariff and travelling in Austria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and the UK you will benefit from this price cut, there are a couple of exceptions. "Officelink" customers and customers using BlackBerry or Sidekick devices will not receive the same price cuts. The countries listed above are where T-mobile operates it's own network, Max Miller the head of carrier services at T-Mobile said they are negotiating with other carriers to try and get discounted prices elsewhere.

If the cost of data transmission continues to fall and availability of VOIP enabled handsets improves customers will be able to use their data allowance to place cheaper calls back to the UK and to other countries using technologies like Skype and SIP.

China’s Ministry of Information Industry has announced that all handsets sold in China must include a USB interface for battery-charging and data-transmission.

The government hopes that this will help consumers save money as they will not need to purchase a new power adapter each time they purchase a new handset. Also, with USB as the power standard, devices such as notebook PCs can be used to charge phones.

This makes a lot of sense hopefully this will be introduced in the UK as well.

You can read the full article with technical details here.

A company you have probably never heard of; Omnifone has just launched a new service that allows unlimited music downloads to a mobile phone for £1.99 a week. They believe that subscription is the future of music downloads and have signed up the major record labels and done a deal with the mobile phone operators.

The new Sony W900 Walkman Phone!

There will be no additional charge for downloading songs all you pay is the ~£9 a month fee. If you have a 3G phone and are in an area with good coverage then you should be able to download a 3 minute song in just over a minute. If you only have a GPRS phone then it will take just over three minutes.

This service will surely be attractive to music lovers who are on the move, commute to work and have one of the new MP3 mobile phones like the Sony W900. The price seems fair if you make good use of the service, anyone downloading more than one album a month on iTunes will save money using the Music Station service.

You can read more on the Omnifone website and at the Register.