Pandora has just announced several new features and ways to listen to Pandora's personalized Internet radio. One of the key announcements is their new partnership with Sprint, which marks as Pandora's first mobile deal.

Sprint subscribers can now listen to Pandora on select mobile phones using a pre-installed player or downloaded software. Just point your Sprint browser to Pandora.com to initiate the download.

The Pandora service on Sprint is free for the first 30-days, afterwhich it's available for $3/month (on top of your Sprint Power Vision data plan). This subscription also removes the ads on the newly redesigned Pandora.com.

Mobile audio solutions like this pose a serious threat to the satellite radio industry. Yes, both Sirius and XM have had deals with mobile providers in place for quite some time, but inherently these services compete with satellite radio's own core service. Since this is Pandora's first un-tethered solution, you can bet that there will be quite a bit more interest from their 6.9 million registered userbase. And that ain't good news.

[via TechCrunch]

In their ongoing rebranding effort, the Cingular 8525 smartphone now will be known as the... AT&T 8525. But the stellar namechange isn't the only news here, the 8525 is getting some added features, including XM Radio Mobile pre-loaded.

The AT&T 8525 still rocks many of the features that made it popular when it launched last year: like a sliding QWERTY keyboard, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, a 2-megapixel camera and video recorder, WMP 10 Mobile and support for Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0.

Now, the AT&T 8525 also comes with AT&T Push to Talk functionality as well as AT&T Mobile Music - which includes XM Satellite Radio - pre-installed.

AT&T Mobile Music lets you download full-track songs, music videos, ringtones, music news, and MusicID. AT&T 8525 users can also access music chat rooms, streaming over-the-air music and AT&T is the first U.S. carrier to offer subscription music to the handset from services like Yahoo! and eMusic.

AT&T Mobile Music includes XM Satellite Radio, pre-loaded on the 8525. So the 25 commercial-free music channels from the XM Radio Mobile service is immediately available to subscribers.

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