Nokia Music Store Review Roudup (Verdict: Good, but not great)

Today the Nokia Music Store launched. People in the UK, who use Windows and Internet Explorer will be able to use it. This angered Carlo Longino who thought that Nokia said they are now an Internet Company. Last time I checked companies like Google didn’t stop working because of the weird operating system or browser I’m currently using. I’ve always questioned Nokia’s claim of becoming an internet company, but I’m going to give them at least a year or two to make that shift into the service industry before I start judging them. With the numbers they pull in every quarter, who cares how successful this venture is right now.

Tech Digest took a three part approach to digesting Nokia’s latest service. The first blog post lists the experiences of the first hour man handling the music store. Being asked to accept a licence felt intimidating, problems with the music streaming that magically disappeared after the browser restarted and a general appreciation of the user interface were noted. A direct copy of iTune’s free track of the week was appreciated. The second blog post has quite a few of screenshots of the store itself and the third blog post is their actual verdict. The don’t like the fact that some tracks are 128 kbps and others are 192 kbps, they like the price point, they don’t like the mobile music store only works with 2 devices as of right now, but at the end of the day they like unlimited streaming.

Speaking about the store, Ricky Cadden made a video demoing what exactly it is like, check it out on his blog here or just watch below:

Click To Play

Enough about the desktop part of the Music Store, what about the mobile version? Rafe from All About Symbian has a ton of screen shots of the interface, lucky dog is in the UK. From what I can tell it is actually usable. I remember the experience in London and it is genuinely consumer friendly. Granted I don’t fit the typical profile of an ordinary consumer, but Nokia does dumb down the UI enough that you can’t get lost even if you tried.

Even though I posted this video yesterday, I still have to recommend you watch it to get an even better taste of what the music store looks like on a mobile phone. This is the work of James at Nokia Creative:

As for me, I’ve been poking at it all day and I’m genuinely not interested in it. I would actually prefer a desktop client, but it has been confirmed it will eventually be released. The sound quality is great as far as I can tell and the store found all my weird mid 80’s early 90’s eurotrash songs that make people question my sexuality. It even found a few of the obscure metal bands I like, no Trans-Siberian Orchestra however. Give me unlimited streaming to my device and I might be interested, but in its current state I’m just not going to give Nokia my money for this service.

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