by Steve O'Hear
April 29th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | 
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Nokia and I are in agreement over at least one thing: the company made mistakes when launching its all-you-can-eat music subscription offering “Comes With Music” in the UK. The service whereby you purchase a qualifying Nokia handset and then get access to the entire library of the Nokia Music Store for 12 – 18 months and get to keep any downloaded tracks once the subscription ends, was launched in the UK on two aging phones and with the backing of only one carrier and one retail chain.
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by Steve O'Hear
April 23rd, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | Comments Off
Nokia's Comes With Music at Carphone Warehouse, UK
Nokia’s all-you-can-eat music offering “Comes With Music” (CWM) hasn’t exactly caught on in the UK, according to Music Ally, with the service attracting just over 23,000 active users. “Given the high-profile marketing campaign around its launch with retailer Carphone Warehouse, that’s a sluggish start”, notes the site. So why has CWM been a flop here in the UK?
First a quick recap of what CWM offers: those who purchase a supported Nokia handset get 12 months “unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalog with the ability to keep all downloaded tracks even after the year is over.” Tracks can be downloaded “over the air” or sideloaded via a PC (Windows only), and are ‘policed’ using Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM). To continue downloading tracks on an “unlimited” basis once the 12 months are up, users need to purchase a new CWM handset.
While the thinking behind CWM has some merit – offer a paid-for music service in a way that “feels like free” and compensates labels and artists accordingly – Nokia’s execution has been poor, at least in the UK (sales elsewhere are reportedly much better), although much of the blame, as always, must rest with the record labels themselves.
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by Steve O'Hear
April 9th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile, Net TV | Comments Off
A much overlooked feature of Nokia’s Nseries smartphones is their ability to share media with other DLNA-certified devices. In fact, DLNA certification in general is marketed very poorly considering that it goes someway to reaching the holy grail of home media whereby various devices – computers, cellphones, games consoles, hard drives, media streamers and other hardware – can all play nicely together to share and stream media around the home. That’s the aim anyway, although in practice not only is DLNA’s messaging underwhelming, but issues such as copyprotection and varying support for different file formats have held back the technology, which, as I’ve previously noted, offers so much promise. Anyway, back to Nokia.
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by Steve O'Hear
April 6th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | View Comments
With today’s news that the next generation iPhone could feature an FM transmitter so that music stored on Apple’s handset can be played on a car stereo (or any device with an FM tuner in close proximity) without the need to carry around extra cables or a separate iPod add-on, I was reminded that Nokia’s N85 and a few of the company’s other existing handsets already offer this feature. Since I currently have an N85 on loan, here’s a quick walk-through of how the FM transmitter works on the device…
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by Steve O'Hear
April 3rd, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | Comments Off
Live BBC TV and radio streaming (UK-only) is now available on Nokia’s flagship N96 and the all touch screen XpressMusic 5800 aka The Tube, reports All About Symbian.
The complete range of BBC television channels are accessible, including digital, along with the public broadcaster’s full radio lineup. AAS describes the picture quality as “not brilliant”, with a frame size of 176 by 144 pixels, although this can be scaled up to full screen in the S60 version of RealPlayer.
See also: Hands-on: BBC iPlayer for Nokia N96
Not a Nokia first
As readers may remember, last September, in a slightly controversial move, the BBC announced that it had developed a version of iPlayer for the Nokia N96 that supported both streaming and downloads – a first for mobile – despite the fact that the handset hadn’t yet been released in the UK and therefore had a market share of zero. This left the BBC open to criticism that it was favoring one commercial player over others. Instead, why hadn’t it chosen to support equivalent handsets that viewers already owned rather than one that was yet to hit the market?
Part of the reason was technology, the N96 has an updated version of RealPlayer and the necessary Digital Rights Management functionality, along with the BBC betting on the device selling well in the UK or at least being picked up by carriers (the latter is certainly true). The same criticism, however, can’t be levvied this time around. As we reported back in December, live BBC TV and radio streaming was introduced as part of an updated mobile iPlayer site compatible with the Samsung Omnia, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and C905.
by Steve O'Hear
March 30th, 2009 | Posted in Comms, Mobile, Social | Comments Off
At last, smartphones running the Nokia-led Symbian S60 OS have a native Twitter application. And a very slick one at that.
Gravity is supported on phones running S60 version 3, including my own Nokia E71, as well as the latest touch-friendly S60 version 5, which powers the Nokia 5800 (aka the Tube) and the upcoming N97.
The app supports a host of features, including…
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by Steve O'Hear
March 26th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | View Comments
Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of Nokia’s QWERTY-touting E71 and currently use the device as my primary smartphone, along with testing a whole bunch of new handsets. That said, I’m as fickle as the next geek, and ever since Nokia announced the upcoming E75, which also features a full QWERTY keyboard but in a very different form factor to the E71, I’ve been eying it up as a potential replacement. Earlier this week I scored a pre-production unit (on loan only) and so rather than waiting to do a full review I thought I’d post my first hands-on impressions and a few photos to go with it.
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by Steve O'Hear
March 12th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | Comments Off
Vodafone, which currently operates music download stores in over 20 countries, is to become the latest company to jump on the DRM-free bandwagon, announcing this week that it will soon be transitioning its music catalog away from the copy-protected WMA format to standard MP3s. Additionally, customers will be able to covert their existing Vodafone purchases to DRM-free versions at no extra charge, unlike Apple’s current iTunes arrangement where users wishing to ‘upgrade’ are effectively asked to pay twice.
That’s the good news as far as Vodafone is concerned. The bad: only three of the four major record labels are on board – Universal Music Group, Sony Music and EMI – with Warner, for now at least, refusing to join in the fun, and the whole DRM-free deal only applies to a la carte downloads not Vodafone’s MusicStation all-you-can eat subscription service.
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by Steve O'Hear
March 11th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | Comments Off
Perhaps to the disdain of mobile carriers, Nokia continues to ramp up its own music offering. Three new music-focused handsets were announced today, along with expansion of the company’s own music download store and all-you-can-eat ‘Comes With Music’ subscription-based offering.
Of the three new handsets, the most interesting is the higher end XpressMusic 5730 (available Q3, €280), which is Nokia’s first music phone to feature a full (slide out) QWERTY keyboard, and just like the 5800, runs the company’s Symbian S60 smartphone OS. The 5730 is being pitched as both a music-centric and messaging – think email, IM and social networking – device, featuring a redesigned home screen that gives shortcut access to the phone’s music library, and the socially-aware ‘contacts’ bar, which is able to pull in the latest communication and RSS feeds from up to 20 of a user’s most important contacts.
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by Steve O'Hear
March 5th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments Off
No sooner do I get my hands on Nokia’s N85 smartphone, and the Finnish handset maker announces its successor – the N86. However, since the two devices share so much in common – the most noticeable ‘upgrade’ being the N86’s 8 megapixel camera and improved optics – I thought I’d share five things that I really like about the Nokia N85.
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by Steve O'Hear
February 27th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | View Comments
It’s always interesting to see the politics of business play out through leaks in the media, and I suspect that in the case of Nokia and its mobile carrier “partners” we haven’t seen the last of it. The Finnish handset maker’s recent announcement of a tie up with Skype has, predictably, rankled two carriers in the UK, reports Mobile Today.
See also: Nokia announces online music store – takes aim at Apple and mobile carriers
Both Orange and O2 are unhappy that a Skype client will be bundled with Nokia’s upcoming N97 and are threatening to boycott the device and the company’s future Skype-enabled phones, for fear that including the application will further reduce their role to that of being a “dumb pipe”. According to Mobile Today’s source:
“This is another example of them trying to build an ecosystem that is all about Nokia and reduces the operator to a dumb pipe. Some people like 3 may be in a position where it could make sense to accept that. But if you spend upwards of £40m per year building your brand, you don’t want to be just a dumb pipe do you?
Nokia have tried several ways to own the customer over the years and operators have had to say no.”
Owning the customer, of course, is something that Apple has managed to achieve, and which 02 seems to have accepted in return for iPhone exclusivity here in the UK. Nokia, with its aggressive move into providing various web services (music subscriptions, maps, email, IM and social networking) is also trying to have a more direct relationship with the customer, presumably hoping that said services will help lock them into a continuous cycle of Nokia handset upgrades. At the same time, both companies, like any handset maker, need the carriers to stay on side so that they’ll continue to subsidize and market their wares. That seems like a conflict of interest if there ever was one, and I can’t see the issue being resolved any time soon.
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by Steve O'Hear
February 17th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments Off
This week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona has seen a flurry of handset announcements boasting, amongst other features, more megapixels, support for HD video, OLED screens and touchscreen UIs. Here’s five handsets that caught my eye.
Samsung Omnia HD
Not content with competing on megapixels alone, the Omnia HD, as the name suggests, is the first smartphone to both record and playback High Definition video. And that’s proper High Def (720p) unlike the slightly misleadingly named Touch HD from HTC. However, there’s much, much more to like about the Omnia HD, not least its 3.7″ AM OLED touch screen, which if the screen on Nokia’s N85 is anything to go by (I have one on loan right now), will be absolutely stunning. The device also has full DLNA certification, meaning that it’s possible to share media shot or stored on the handset with other UPnP AV devices, such as a PlayStation 3 connected to a High Definition TV.
OS-wise, the Omnia HD uses the latest Symbian OS and the touch-friendly version of S60, although Samsung have customized the home screen quite a bit, including various widgets as first seen on the Tocco.
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