Not Another Mobile Phone Blog

Nokia Music Store in Nokia's answer to Apple's iTunes. If you compare Nokia Music Store with iTunes you will realize that, Nokia Music Store has good number of tracks from different Genres including Bollywood, International and also many regional track listings. To access the Nokia Music Store from your desktop you need to have the Ovi player. The Ovi player, which doubles up as your media player as well as your interface to the Nokia Music Store is pretty easy to use and has the ability to replace your current media player (might not stand true for power users). Ovi player is an easy to use media player with clean interface. The layout of the Nokia Music Store is simple, on the top you have a the latest releases promos running then, in the middle column you will have Best Sellers, New Releases Bollywood and South. This is the looks and feel of the store when you access it from the desktop i.e. your Ovi player. One draw back of this application is that, it is only available for Windows based machines and not for people who have Mac OS or Linux on their machines, which is sad. Nokia needs to make this multi platform application. Also, if you wanna download songs you need to have PIN numbers that come with the vouchers. The vouchers are currently available only with select handsets and the dongs are not DRM free. So you need to buy a handset and then redeem that PIN, unless you figure out a way to get hold of these redeemable PINs and use them in the store. The tracks can be downloaded once you create a Nokia Ovi account and use your PIN that comes with the phone. Only the new Nokia phones (shown in the image) come with the PIN and if you see only the Music oriented handsets and multimedia handsets can download almost 50 to 100 tracks. The store lets you listen to the 30 second clip of the song before you finally want to buy it. After the 30 second clip you can also decide not to go for the song. The store does not let you download full albums, you have to download every single song if you plan to go for a particular album, which is really annoying at times. But, I give the benefit of doubt to Nokia because, majority of us would be interested in downloading particular tracks from an album. The downloaded tracks can be played on your PC (the one which you used to download) and can also be transferred onto your Nokia device. The tracks are not DRM free so whenever you try to play the tracks on any other device (i mean if transferred to any other device), it will connect to the Ovi store and process your log-in information and then only play the tracks. This holds true for every single track you transfer to any other device. The tracks can be transferred between the PC (which has the Ovi Player that was used to download the tracks) any number of times but can be burnt only 10 times into a disc. You also get album art along with the tracks and no points for guessing that, it is optimized for Nokia phones.The Nokia Music Store has a good and impressive database of Hindi, Bollywood, albums and South songs. It also has a good database of old Hindi songs and whatever songs you search for in this genre, you wont be disappointed with the results. The Store, when launched, had 30,00,000 tracks and I am sure that, this number has grown in the last two to three months. The store's regional music data bas is also really cool. Huge Hindi and regional database of songs is one of the USP of the Nokia Music Store, which lets it score over the iTunes. The search feature in the Music Store is confusing. I am of the belief that you should just have one option for search, just write the song name and hit search, no need to provide space for artist as well as song name. Options like these should be there in advance search menu, which a user might use when needed.

Some of the things that stand out when you use the Nokia Music Store are, Good Collection of Hindi/Bollywood/Regional songs; Good online Music Buying experience; Accurate Search results (especially for Hindi songs); the Ovi player is nice with good features.

The things that were a turn-off were, Songs are DRM protected; International Collection lacks depth; confusing search option; Vouchers needed for downloading tracks (vouchers available with only new Nokia phones).

I think, the current Music Store is a good start from Nokia but going ahead its should simplify the search options, have DRM free tracks, have PayPal or something so that even if a user does not have a voucher, he/she can easily buy the tracks for any phone.