Nokia music? Comes without mobile

Posted by Steve Mullins Friday, October 17th, 2008

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Plenty of plaudits for Nokia’s Comes With Music mobile music service which launches in the UK today. The biggest problem is that it’s barely mobile at all. To avoid users racking up hefty data charges on wireless networks, Nokia gets them downloading tracks to the PC for sideloading to the handset.

That’s clunky, and there are reports that it can take more than 3 minutes to put a single album on a phone. I’ve been talking to Nokia for the last 18 months about its music ambitions and execs keep telling me the company’s platform-agnostic when it comes to content. Well, it shouldn’t be – after all, Nokia does have a big name in MOBILE. And I don’t recall IBM saying it doesn’t really care whether people use laptops or mobile phones to access the Internet. The company needs to make sure CWM tracks can be delivered directly to handsets, just like Sony Ericsson is doing with its Play Now Plus service. One thing you can say about SE is that it knows it’s a mobile company.