Virgin Mobile now has a winning card in their hands: introducing Virgin Mobile's Wild Card by Kyocera. It's a mobile phone than can stream music through its Headliners streaming audio application. How's that for getting your music on the go?

Kyocera's Wild Card is looking nifty, with its flip open QWERTY keyboard, color LCD screen, and a 1.3 megapixel camera that will become handy should you wish to save some memories you have with your friends.

The going rate isn't bad either. The audio streaming service through Virgin Wireless is only US$ 2.50 per month, and songs on demand are available for a very affordable 25 cent rate. Reports have mentioned that the song-on-demand fee will permit unlimited listening to the song, but Virgin did not clarify exactly how.

It looks like Virgin is definitely on the roll with their audio streaming services, including Virgin Radio for the Wii and PS3, and we're definitely not complaining.

Two years ago, Nokia dreamt up Visual Radio. It would be a traditional radio broadcast with a twist: images and information would be sent to your mobile phone. It's basically a love affair between radio and GPRS.

Now, two years later, Nokia finally launches Visual Radio. But only in the UK.

Two radio stations will launch it: Virgin Radio in London and GWR FM in Bristol. It's a bit of a technological tripod:

1. Hewlett-Packard is handling the back-end technology
2. O2 is the data carrier
3. the radio stations themselves will provide the content

Whether this will last or not is a matter of economics. The typical mobile phone subscriber might not be willing to pay extra for the service (paying to listen to the radio? people usually do that for free!). We also think that with the multimedia, Internet, infrared, and Bluetooth capabilities common in a lot of phones, there's already a lot of ways to send and receive content. Our analysis: unless the radio stations' content is unique, people will not go for it. And what's to prevent people from just waiting for the content to get passed among friends' phones, laptops, and PDAs?

Still, O2 and the radio stations seem optimistic. Virgin sees this as a way to boost advertising income (good news for advertisers but this could be a potential nuisance for mobile phone subscribers who end up just getting ads). O2 is banking on the popularity of the built-in radios in their handsets - since people are happy with them, they might be willing to take the next step and pay for Visual Radio.

One last thing: Nokia is really getting into music. Nokia bought Loudeye earlier this week (Loudeye is a company that processes and distributes digital music).