Cricket Communications, a subsidiary of Leap Wireless, announced its first Muve Music-enabled Android phone. The service, available for $65 a month, brings Leap’s unlimited music option to prepaid smartphones.

Samsung Vitality

Cricket launched Muve Music’s unlimited music offering for feature phones earlier this year for $55 per month. The new service will allow users who purchase the new Samsung Vitality, operating on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform, or another Android-powered phone Cricket to download an unlimited number of full-track downloads of their choosing directly to the phone. The service includes unlimited text, talk and web.

Leap has managed to double the number of Muve users to 200,000 in just two months.

“We saw within our customer base a real love of music but weren’t having a very good experience with digital music services. That became a unique opportunity to do something innovative in the space with the customers that had never been done for,” said Cricket vice president and general manager of Muve Music, Jeff Toig, in an interview withFierceMobileContent.

“The existing digital music world was build for the computer and ported to the phone and not a customer who is enabled for a cash ecosystem,” said Toig.

Toig explained that Muve felt confident about moving into the mobile music space after the success it had selling ringtones and saw this as an opportunity for growth. Customers were downloading over 400 songs a month, Toig reported, over Leap’s 3G service.

“We created this as a download service not as a streaming service because a download service is a better experience and better on the network,” said Toig.

Unlike with Apple’s iTunes or Amazon’s music store, the Muve service does not require a user to have a credit card. The music service is billed as part of the overall wireless service so the “customer feels like it is free in their plan,” said Toig.

Following in the footsteps of other music services like Spotify, Muve Music formed partnerships with the major record labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music  Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music.

Also of note is that Muve’s service can be used internationally. Toig confirmed that since music is downloaded directly to the device, usually in 10-20 seconds, rather than streaming from a separate server, the music can be played even in areas without wireless service or in other countries.

“As long as I’ve got my phone I’ve got my service. So if you are paying your bill you get all your features,” explained Toig. “If you have paid your bill on the first day of the month, and on the tenth day of the month your phone will work, even if you are overseas. It’s easy.”

Leap Wireless competitor, MetroPCS  announced an all-you-can-eat ad-free music service in August in partnership with Rhapsody.

“I will say any time a competitor tries to copy your innovation, you know you’re onto something good. As a headline it’s flattering that they’re rushing to produce something similar,” said Toig.

The service plans to launch nationwide later in 2011.

Mobile app market exchange appbackr has revealed it has now sold US$1 million worth of apps through its marketplace and has been seeing quarterly sales growth of 149 percent.

appbackr is a developer and backer community founded in 2010 that provides funding and distribution for the most innovative mobile apps. Developers work with appbackr to secure funding to finance their app development work and then to market and distribute the finished apps. Backers can pre-buy wholesale copies of apps and receive retail revenues when apps go on sale.

The company has also unveiled its SmartApps algorithm-based analytics tool for identifying and predicting which Android – and soon iPhone – apps have the greatest potential to make it big on the marketplace. SmartApps combines reviews, presale data and comparative analytics to obtain the results.

Using this tool, the company has come up with the Android Smart10 which lists the apps with the greatest potential. An iPhone Smart10 is due next month.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer says his company has a competitive advantage over Apple in the tablet computer market given its vast catalog of movies and music. “Yes, yes, Apple makes an iPad,” Stringer said, but does it make movies? Sony, he added, wants to prove that it’s not who makes a tablet first that counts, but “who makes it better.”

MTS, Russia’s largest mobile operator, claims that its range of own-brand devices makes it the country’s fifth-largest handset vendor, the firm’s VP and Chief Commercial Officer, Mikhail Gerchuk, told Mobile World Live in an exclusive video interview.

Gerchuk (pictured) said that MTS-branded devices currently represent about 20 percent of sales via the operator’s retail stores, making them the fifth most popular Russian handset brand after Nokia, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson. “We expect… to become the fourth-largest handset vendor this year,” he added.

The operator’s own-branded devices are mainly Android-based and include handsets and tablets. It also offers the iPhone, though Nokia devices remain its most popular. “Our objective is to give customers choice and to let customers decide which platform to choose,” said Gerchuk. He noted that current smartphone penetration at MTS was around 15 percent and forecast to rise to around 25 percent by the end of the year.

MTS is also pushing its own brand in the apps space, including via its own Russian-language apps store which boasts “several thousand” titles and supports operator billing.

“We have about ten of our own MTS-branded applications that cover [the] most important parts of the customer experience,” said Gerchuk. These include a location-based app (MTS Navigator), an app that allows customers to keep their personal information in the cloud to restore to a new device if their phone is lost (MTS Second Memories); and a mobile payments app (MTS Easy Payment).

According to the latest Wireless Intelligence data, MTS is the largest operator in Russia on 71 million connections at end-Q2, giving it a 32 percent market share.

Opera Software is partnering with mobile payment and analytics firm Bango to introduce new purchase and billing options within its Opera Mobile Store. Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browser users may now buy apps and premium in-app content from the store and then charge the transaction to their credit card or monthly carrier bill.

Opera Mobile Store (built in association with white-label storefront solutions provider Appia) touts apps and content targeted to each consumer’s specific mobile device, local market and currency. The storefront spans more than 200 countries and every mobile platform, offering both premium and free applications. Although the store is a featured Speed Dial link on the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers, it is also accessible across devices running non-Opera browsers. Developers earn 70 percent of net revenues generated via the Opera Mobile Store.

Close to 122 million mobile subscribers worldwide accessed Opera Mini in July 2011, browsing more than 74.0 billion pages. Earlier this month, Opera Software introduced Oupeng, a new browser developed for the enormous Chinese market. In addition to leveraging Opera’s signature data compression technology, which increases page loading speeds by up to 10 times while reducing data consumption as much as 90 percent, Oupeng embeds support for Weibo, one of China’s premier microblogging services, enabling users to share content, post updates and view photos.

Samsung unveiled ChatON, a free mobile messaging service enabling users to communicate across all major smartphone and feature phone platforms.

Similar in concept to the very popular BBM by Research In Motion’s, ChatON enables users to share text communications, photos, video clips and hand-written notes; the service includes support for group messaging and also features a web client to enable conversations between mobile and PC users. Alongside the basic ChatON service optimized for feature phones, Samsung will offer a feature-rich version for smartphones including interaction rankings, animated messages and a “Trunk” for automatic content sharing.

Samsung will launch ChatON next month in more than 120 countries, with support for up to 62 languages. It also plans expand the solution beyond mobile phones to connected devices like tablets and netbooks.

ChatON is the latest entry in the increasingly competitive mobile messaging space. Apple’s  much-anticipated iOS 5 operating system overhaul brings with it iMessage, which lets consumers send free text messages, photos and videos among all iOS devices. Facebook Messenger, a free, standalone application introduced earlier this month, enables iOS and Android device users to correspond directly with their Facebook friends. And just last week, Skype acquired group messaging solutions startup GroupMe, whose application enables users to text and make conference calls with circles of friends or colleagues across multiple operating systems.

So we can say that the battle is really heating up in the mobile chat space with handsets up against cross platform guys like Facebook and Skype.

Lady Gaga (right) has her own headphones range called Heartbeats

Dr. Dre is selling just over half of his audio company Beats Electronics to smartphone maker HTC.

It is buying a 51% stake in the rapper’s company for $309 million (£190m).

Beats Electronics makes headphones and speakers and was set up by Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine.

The purchase will be HTC’s fifth acquisition this year, as the company fights to increase share against rivals Apple and Samsung.

The Taiwanese firm said it expected the deal to close in the next few months and to have a number of products that incorporate Beats technology on the market by the end of the year.

Jimmy Iovine, chairman and founder of Beats Electronics, will continue to run the company.

He is also chairman of Interscope Records, which produces albums for the likes of Black Eyed Peas and All Time Low, and a mentor on American Idol.

Dr. Dre founded Beats Electronics in 2006 with the company’s headphones costing as much as $600 (£368).

The investment arm of silicon giant Intel has announced a US$300 million fund to ramp up support for ‘Ultrabooks,’ mobile devices which it claims will combine the performance of today’s laptops with tablet-like features. In a statement, Intel said the Intel Capital Ultrabook Fund will develop over the next 3-4 years and will “focus on investing in companies building technologies that will help revolutionise the computing experience and morph today’s mobile computers into the next ‘must have’ device.” Ultrabooks aim to offer a thin, light product at mainstream prices that boast longer battery life and improved storage capacity compared to today’s smartphones, tablets and laptops. The first devices are expected to hit shelves this winter.