T-Mobile's Jukebox is go

Fiendishly simple two-pronged download package launches.

It's such a simple idea it's amazing no one's thought of it before, but at least now T-Mobile have. Their Mobile Jukebox service, available from today, allows customers with any one of 32 handsets to download music to their phone and their PC simultaneously.

The four major record labels - Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner - are on board along with the smaller likes of Beggars Banquet and V2, and there's a choice of 500,000 tracks for a nice round quid apiece. In a nice egalitarian move, the service is available to the humble pay-as-you-go user as well as those on contract, and it's on 2.5G as well as 3G. Power to the mobile proletariat!

The pound cost gets you two downloads of the same track - one compressed AAC to your phone and one WMA to your PC. It's all backed up on a website, so even if some little oik makes off with your W880i, you'll still have all the tunes you paid for. (We still await the anti-theft device that makes a lifted handset play Orson at top volume.)

All this month T-Mobile are giving away five tracks to anyone with a Mobile Jukebox compatible handset. We'll have Diddy's Diana-centric version of 'I'll Be Missing You' five times, please.