This year, I’ve decided to spend more time using my connected phone for my online life. I’ve been taking it a step at a time. First I started using my Symbian based Nokia 5800 to post my tweets on Twitter using an excellent app called Gravity. Then, I’ve setup my mobile phone so that I can use it as a mobile 3G router that I can use to connect to the Internet from my notebook and netbook. This pass couple of weeks, I’ve been using a mobile app called Mobbler that lets me listen to my Last.fm radio stations.
Last.fm, in a nutshell for those who aren’t yet familiar with it, is an Internet radio service with a social and personal twist. Personal because instead of just being able to play predetermined Internet radio stations, Last.fm discovers and tries to recommend music that suites your taste based on music that you have listened to. As you use the service more often, it will be able to discover and recommend music. It does this by scrobbling which means that it samples the music that you listen to and determines the type of music you like based on computer algorithms that Last.fm have created. Social because the Last.fm service allows you to share your favorite music with others and it allows you to listen to music others like via the created “personal radio stations”. Last.fm is not free though. You pay a monthly fee of about $3/month (at the time of this writing). But for three bucks, you don’t have to shell out a lot of dough just to be able to listen to your favorite music and just limit buying music tracks to the ones that you really love. You can read more about what’s happening at the Last.fm blog.
Now back to Mobbler, a mobile app that functions both as a Last.fm music player and a scrobbler. With Mobbler, you can listen to your personal Last.fm radio and other radio stations on Last.fm. Mobbler also implements other Last.fm functions such as favorite which marks tracks as music you love. You can also ban a music track so that it doesn’t get played on you personal station again.
Mobbler is also a scrobbler. If you start the app on your Symbian mobile phone, it connects to Last.fm. If you start playing music files stored on your mobile phone, it will send “scrobbling” data to Last.fm which will be used to help the service discover and recommend more music when you play your personal station in the Last.fm service.
Here’s some screenshots of the Mobbler app
Although the Last.fm service isn’t free, the Mobbler app for Symbian is. And another good thing about it is that it’s open source. You can check out the Mobbler home page for more details. You can find other users of Mobbler at their Last.fm page. Last.fm has been around for quite a while and has really provided a good service. Also one advantage of Last.fm is that the service is more widely available than other freemium services like Pandora or Spotify. A word of warning though if you’re going to use these kind of music services, just make sure that you have an unlimited data plan on your mobile phone because it does use a lot of bandwidth for streaming. 
That said, you can download Mobbler by using the download link on this page. Join Last.fm and try out the service for free and later decide to pay for subscription if you like.
