Service after service, app after app, solutions keep appearing to offer media streaming (from our own hard disks or from hosted servers) over the air. But what happens when the masses start doing this and the bandwidth runs out? Is putting all our music online really the best solution? When it comes to media that's truly mobile, you can't beat the old school approach, I reckon....

"There's a whole new category of software and service, typified by the likes of Phling, offering to either host all your media and then stream it to you over the air, or simply to stream it from your own PC, switched on at home. This is fine and dandy when Wi-Fi and landline broadband it taking the strain, and it's fine and cool in principle and probably works very well in test conditions today.

The trouble comes when you actually go mobile. Relying on heavy, continuous streamed data over a 3.5G connection already breaks down, irritatingly, in busy urban areas (for congestion reasons) and in rural areas (for lack of 3G signal reasons)."

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