Just wanted to remind everyone that Oomble not only allows you to drag and drop content from your favorites sites such as Flickr and Facebook into your phone, but it also allows you to drag content from your phone into these sites. As shown below, I can drag a photo on my phone right into Flickr:

When I drop the photo into Flickr, the message field on top will tell me "Uploading to service provider . . . " and when its finished, it will say "Item uploaded to service provider." I can then just click on Flickr in my media sources (or go to Flickr outside of Oomble, it doesn't matter) to go to Flickr's site and I'll see my photo in Flickr's PhotoStream!

As always, please email us at support@oomble.com with any suggestions and questions and follow us (and tweet about us!) on Twitter at www.twitter.com/oomble

Hopefully, you're now getting a good feel for how Oomble can help you manage the media on your devices through the web. What you may not have yet noticed is what your My Oomble account does. Your My Oomble account is located on the top of the Navigation Panel.

Your My Oomble account serves as an "automatic" online storage while you are on Oomble. Whenever you drag a photo from Flickr or Facebook into your phone or upload a song from your PC or iTunes into your phone, that photo or song is automatically stored in your My Oomble account. Similarly, any photos uploaded from your phone into the Oomble interface are also automatically stored in your My Oomble account. My Oomble makes you feel safer when you delete things off your phone because you know you have a backup copy of it sitting in your My Oomble account that you can always drag back into your phone.

As always, please email us at support@oomble.com and follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/oomble

If you're a big user of your camera phone (and are as bad with the camera phone as I am!), perhaps you've taken many photos on your phone that just aren't worth keeping. Maybe they are just sitting on your phone because you didn't want to delete them right away. Now you've got a whole bunch of them sitting there and it is a little annoying flipping through them on the phone and trying to delete them.

Through Oomble's web interface, you get a real-time view of all the photos sitting on your phone and can easily delete them without ever touching your phone. First, just press "Sync" to make sure that Oomble is synced up with your phone. Go to Photos underneath your phone in the Navigation Panel and all the photos sitting on your phone should be there. Now go ahead and select those you don't like and delete them by pressing the Delete button shown below:

Once you are finished deleting them off the Oomble interface, just press "Sync" again and Oomble goes to work deleting those photos off the phone.

Oh, and don't worry if you deleted a photo off the phone by mistake! If you go to My Oomble -> Photos, you'll find it backed up there and you can drag it right back into your phone (or into Flickr, Facebook, or wherever you store your photos). But if you also delete it from your My Oomble account, then it's really is gone :-(

As always, email us at support@oomble.com with any questions and follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/oomble

There have been some interesting developments in digital music over the last few months. As the major labels are finally willing to look at alternate business models, new streaming music services have arrived. MySpace now offers unlimited on-demand streams of a large number of artist tracks for free and Pandora has recently released a client for the iPhone. Where does this leave digital purchase and download services like iTunes, Amazon MP3, and Walmart music? These music stores have been very popular since they offer the convenience of immediate gratification and allow songs to be side-loaded onto mobile devices. However with the addition of wireless networking into new devices, the game changes because now there are alternate methods of delivering digital content without first requiring songs to be downloaded to a local PC.

Of course there are pros and cons to the different approaches to delivering content. Streamed music gives you access to a large catalog of content (either from your private collection or from an online repository) and allows users to start listening to content without waiting for a complete track to download first. On the other hand, full-track downloads allow instant access to local content (no waiting for downloads to start over the network), offers offline access, and reduced battery consumption. When we think of the cell phone as a music consumption device, the battery issue becomes important. Given that the main use of a cell phone (communications via voice, email, and text) is critical for most people, having some service drain the battery on your phone can become an issue. If your iPod drains, you don't have music for a while... no big deal. If your phone is dead, your ability to communicate is severely limited.

From a business perspective, the streaming model still offers challenges when it comes to generating revenue, since royalties must be paid on a per-stream basis. Subscriptions are one solution, but we will have to wait to see if consumers embrace this model, given they have become accustomed to downloading and owning content, especially when it comes to mobile devices. I suspect (free) streaming will continue to gain in popularity on the web, but full-track downloads will be the method of choice on mobile devices for the foreseeable future.

When you first use Oomble, there is an initial sync that takes place where Oomble looks for the media content on your phone and uploads it into your My Oomble account so that you can see and manage that content on the Oomble site. If you have a lot of media already on your phone, this process can take a long time.

To start using Oomble faster, you can turn that initial sync off. The first time you press "Sync," you'll see the following pop up:

We are pleased to report that after an incredibly successful private beta launch with the Samsung Instinct, we've opened beta registration for the Blackberry Bold! When you enroll at Oomble with a Bold, just use BOLD as the promo code. There are limited slots, so enroll as soon as you can.

The Bold is different from the Instinct in that it has WiFi. While 3G is already pretty fast, Oomble works incredibly fast when the Bold is on WiFi, so we encourage you to try it when you are on WiFi. Let us know how you like Oomble, Bold users!