A few weeks ago, I went to the Nokia booth at MWC last month and checked out their “comes with music” program. For those who are unfamiliar, here’s the deal:
When you buy a Nokia handset you get access to the Nokia Music Store which has deals with all 4 labels. For the 12 months after you purchase the phone you get unlimited downloads from the store. This isn’t a subscription, for one year the plan is for unlimited downloads for you to keep. They can live on both your PC and phone. Once a year is up, you keep all your downloads and you then have to purchase any additional tracks
Their new phones are all pretty slick and have smooth iPod functionality built in. One thing I especially liked was their Bluetooth headset which is also a sweet pair of headphones (see below)
This won’t be available in the states until layer this year and then only in the PC so it’ll be a while before we can fully check it out
One thing that always gets overlooked when peope talk about iPod’s dominance us the fact that it only dominated because it had BOTH the software on the computer and the hardware. Without iTunes, the iPod is nowhere. I was impressed to see the the Nokia software player I’d pretty nice. Not quite as simple as iTunes but still very slick. I haven’t seen any other handset makers making player software which will really hurt them if they try to compete.