Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

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Comes With Music

Also a big part of the 5800, other than the new software, is Comes With Music (CWM), Nokia's unlimited music download service. According to the company, Singapore is the first market to get the 5800 bundled with CWM for S$798 (US$566.72). For comparison's sake, a local export set without CWM is priced at S$560 (US$397.70).

Here's the proposition of CWM's unlimited premise. You can download as many songs as you want, within 12 months, from the Nokia Music Store and you get to keep or re-download the tracks after the service period. So far, tunes from EMI Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music, Universal Music Group and local labels including Rock Records and Ocean Butterflies are available from the store.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (with Comes With Music)
(click for larger image)

Music downloaded from the store are encoded with a 192kbps bitrate in WMA format and are shackled with Windows Media DRM. This means you cannot copy the tracks to another MP3 player, for example, an iPod. Burning music onto a CD also requires additional rights which you must pay for. You can, however, transfer the songs you've downloaded to a new PC within three years of purchasing the CWM handset.

So is this for you? Depends, but the price-for-feature ratio is rather compelling. In the four days that our CWM service was activated, we downloaded over 700 songs, though we would chalk that number to our initial enthusiasm over downloading whatever that's readily available. That brings us to the next point.

What we find most appealing about CWM is the instant gratification it offers. The only thing to watch out for if you are downloading from the device are the airtime charges incurred, which means you'll need to factor in a data plan with decent bandwidth. What would have been great complements to the service are a music recognition app like Track ID on Sony Ericsson mobiles and a feature that pulls the lyrics of the song you are listening to off the Web.

A few other things to note about CWM are that after the initial phase of downloading all the music available on the storefront, it comes to a point where you either search for a particular album or track that you want, or wait for Nokia to refresh the store's page so you can pick from there again.

The downloading speed is also dependant on the network which can make or break the user experience. Mass downloads are best on a PC (no support for Mac) and single tracks on the handset. Syncing between the PC and device is only via the bundled micro-USB cable connection (no Bluetooth). A nice feature to have is the ability to charge via micro-USB.

We did encounter a few errors during downloading where the songs couldn't be found and albums couldn't be downloaded fully. A Nokia representative said that could be due to our network connection as she didn't encounter the problems we noticed on her end. There were instances where we resume the download though that doesn't work all the time.

Tags: Apple iPhone, Screen, Web Browser, Nokia Corp., touch screen

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