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Nokia’s first touch phone, the 5800 XPress Music (right) comes with a new PC-Web-based service called ‘Comes with music’

Anand Parthasarathy

London, Oct. 3 Like a tail wagging the dog, the world’s number one maker of mobile phones, overwhelmed the global unveiling of its first smart touch phone, with an announcement that came later: The launch of a free and unlimited music download service, encompassing a repertoire running into millions of tracks, available to buyers of select Nokia handsets.

The crimson-coloured baroque interior of the Koko Club, a night club in London’s Camden Town and a popular variety theatre even 100 years ago, proved a somewhat bizarre locale for the launch of an Internet Age initiative. Analysts in the cramped and dark seating area were jabbing reports into their laptop keys to predict that the Nokia move might well change, for ever, the business model of paid popular music.

The new handset launched — then 5800 XPress Music — is Nokia’s first touch-sensitive phone. It comes after rivals such as LG, Samsung and Apple with its new iPhone entered the field.

But the more sedate pace of this Scandinavian player has also ensured that it sized up the competition and added its own features: like full Web browsing including Flash content; a touch technology that is truly ‘haptic’ - that means the keys seem to kick back at your fingers — a GPS receiver and a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The 8 GB internal memory can be beefed up with another 16 GB on a micro SD type memory card - which means one can store over 18,000 songs if one were a hard core music freak.

For such buyers, the biggest plus point for forking out Euro 279 ($390) for the 5800 (this is the price before any service provider subsidies) lies in Nokia’s new “Comes With Music” service: Buying this handset or new units of the 5310 XPress Music phone or the N95 smart phone, means one can access a music repertoire running into millions from publishers such as Universal, Sony BMG, Warners or EMI — as well as local music companies in every geography, for one year after purchase.

You can keep all you download for free, during this period, thereafter. The Senior Vice-President (Entertainment and Communities Business), Mr Tero Ojanpera, added that there was no restriction as regards to the format: users could use the ‘Nokia Music For PC’ software to re-format tracks to any standard and also ‘rip’ CDs directly into their phones.

Music publishers plagued by piracy might decide that rather than spend time and money trying to stop the unstoppable, they were better off being paid in bulk by large handset makers such as Nokia — leaving music essentially free for the end-user (provided he/she bought a particular handset).

The 5800 would be launched in India towards the end of 2008 at a price around Rs 20,000, the Nokia Vice-President, Ms Jo Harlow, told Business Line. By then, the company hopes to put together some Indian content into its localised “Comes with Music” initiative.

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