Spreadtrum Communications, Amoi and Kuro have jointly announced China's first solution for music phones offering copyrighted music.

Specifically designed for the growing mobile music market, this solution brings high quality copyright protected music to Chinese mobile handset users, and also pushes domestic music phones' industrial chain to the convergence of the '4Cs' -- Communication, Chip, Content and Copyright.

Through this cooperation, Spreadtrum has embedded Kuro’s services into its chipset platform. The mobile phones equipped with Spreadtrum's chips can now enable the functions of a multimedia player and online music download services.

Amoi has already deployed this combination of new functions and download service, and will launch its new music phone in the near future.

Dr. Ping Wu, president and CEO of Spreadtrum expressed his company’s delight about this cooperation. He noted that embedding Kuro's music copyright protection technology into Spreadtrum's SC6600R platform, a high quality multimedia baseband chipset, the Amoi's mobile phones using Spreadtrum's solution should be able to satisfy consumers' varied but growing levels of demand for copyrighted music.

“We believe this solution enhances the performance and competitiveness of China's domestic music phones,” he said in a statement.

Huang Aiping, the vice president of Amoi said that they aim to be an outstanding provider for the music market segment of handsets.

“It always stands in the front line of the tide of music handsets. From monosyllabic times to the polyphonic era, Amoi has developed a series of products focusing on the consumer's growing demands, and strives to introduce outstanding products which can bring richer musical experiences to consumers,” said Aiping.

Zheng Qicheng, president of iPeer Multimedia International Ltd., said that Beijing Kuro Times Tech. Co., Ltd. is the partner of iPeer Multimedia International Ltd. in China and has the current leading platform for domestic online digital music services.

Qicheng pointed out that Kuro has not only pushed the development of digital music by linking the industry together, but also strives to cross different areas, launching innovative services that integrate original music, star pictorials, and karaoke with verbatim lyrics, using Spreadtrum and Amoi features.

He further explained that it strengthens the additional value of Amoi handsets through the enabling of intelligent song recommendations and community links. In the future, in addition to music-based handsets, the products with 'Kuro Inside' service are expected to include MP3, MPEG4, digital photo frames, U-disk, PC, notebooks and other consumer devices.

“We hope to bring a better quality of service and provide a new mode to all the Chinese hardware manufacturers, providing these partners with more competitive edges and product values,” he concluded.

Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops, and markets baseband processor solutions for the mobile wireless communications market.

Beijing Kuro Times Tech Co., Ltd. is a digital multimedia content service providing company. Its main business is to create user-friendly driven service, deliver e-CD formatted legal contents with very powerful portable devices download capability.

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Anuradha Shukla is a contributing editor for TMCnet, covering call centers, CRM and information technology. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

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