KDDI starts song downloads to cellphones

While we were in our usual fog of adulation over the handsets KDDI released last week we failed to note that they also announced the expansion of their massively successful chaku-uta mp3 ringtone download service to support full-length song downloads. In its current form the service sounds like something of a donkey, in the sense that a 48kbps AAC-format song will set you back an astronomical Y300 ($2.75) and you're only able to play it back on a handset with the same number as the one it was downloaded on (no SIMMs in Japan, unless you have a W-CDMA phone). With hard disk cellphones and megabit download speeds looming the quality should improve, though, so if they can lose the DRM and slash prices we might be rewriting this with a bit more enthusiasm in a year or so.