New Music Gear Monday: The Marshall Smartphone

If you're a hard-core Marshall guitar amp fan, then you're going to love this one.

Marshall is expanding their product line to include a smartphone, and it concentrates more on music than most other smartphones on the market.

The Marshall "London" is an Android phone that's styled after its famous classic amplifiers, right down to the texture and feel. It has a 4.7 inch 720P display, 2GB of RAM, a removable 2500 mAh battery and a Snapdragon 410 processor like some of the best phones already on the market.

Unlike other phones, there are two headphone jacks at the top and two front-facing speakers, plus a dedicated M button on the top of the handset for instant access to your music, which it takes seriously enough to the point where there's also a separate processor just for audio. The London also supports the Bluetooth APTX connection, so wireless audio transfer will stay hi-quality. The phone also comes with a set of Marshall Mode in-ear headphones.

Oh, and the phone works on 3G, 4G and LTE as well.

The Marshall London smartphone is available for pre-order for $499 in the United States. You can find out more about the Marshall London here.

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Your Brain Thinks Your Smartphone Is An Instrument

It's a scientific fact that a musician's brain is stimulated just by picking up a musical instrument. In fact, everyone knows that one of the reasons why musicians have GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) is that obtaining something new makes you want to play and opens up new creative gateways for inspiration.

It's hard to believe, but scientists have found that people who use smartphones stimulate those same regions of the brain, according to a paper in the Current Biology journal.

The scientists noticed that the constant finger movements were similar to what happens to a musician playing a violin. Because of the way a smartphone is operated with thumb, index and middle fingers, its substantially different from a traditional cellphone with buttons, so none of the same brain regions are activated.

There were two differences between smartphone brain stimulation and instrument playing. The length of time spent owning a smartphone did not affect neural activity, so it doesn't equate to practicing an instrument, and the more recently someone used a touchscreen phone, the more likely you are to master it.

Although there's no direct evidence, this may be why many of us continually look for music iPhone apps or new IO. It inherently feels like an instrument, so we naturally want to treat it that way. Now let's see what kind of new iOS apps NAMM brings.