Nokia 'Comes With Music' Not Shaping Up As Expected...and alternatives

Gizmodo UK : Nokia 'Comes With Music' Not Shaping Up As Expected.

Tee hee, it's hard not to snigger at this news, well if you're me anyway, having had to read Nokia fanboys on other sites spouting forth about how this was going to change the world, how it was going to be so superior to anything iTunes could offer etc etc and of course Mr Michael Mace's rather premature prediction about a year ago how Apple and Nokia were "at war" over downloading music tracks.

Looks like it hasn't quite turned out that way and other online sites such as Amazon are turning out to be far bigger competition for one simple reason...DRM free downloads. The Nokia "Comes with Chains" system would be bad enough if it was just DRM like Apple imposes but this tying it to the actual phone, and one phone only, is an even worse mistake. There's a good article in this months UK MacFormat magazine about alternatives to iTune s and some of them sound really good, DRM free with as much as you can eat subscription services like those offered by eMusic. There's a trial offer on at the moment with 25 free tracks and the service can even download the tracks to iTunes.

Sometimes Nokia just strikes me as being a company that just doesn't get it, there's a huge gap in the market in Europe, offering a huge opportunity for a good DRM free setup for mobile phone music downloading and it just brings out completely the wrong product. A DRM free system on a good phone, something as good as for example the iPhone or BB stuff, would be the right move. Sticking on an even more restrictive DRM system than the likes of iTunes onto mediocre phones like the Nokia 5310 is hardly a recipe for success. They should stick to what they know best, making high specced camera and video recording phones.

(ooops... I should have waited until the MacWorld thing was finished, looks like they have introduced some DRM free options which could be the nail in Nokia's "Comes with Chains" coffin offering