Nokia announce new online music store

29 August 2007

Following endless rumours, Nokia today announced their answer to Apple's iTunes, with their own Nokia Music Store.

Due to be finalised over the coming months, the Nokia Music Store (http://music.nokia.com) will be able to be accessed via your desktop computer or straight from optimised Nokia devices starting with the new Nokia N81 and Nokia N95 8GB. Through these handsets, users will be able to purchase a song direct to their mobile without having to first download it to their computer.

Other new Nokia handsets including the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic and the Nokia 5610 XpressMusic phones can receive tracks - said to cost EUR 1.00 each - via a PC, as long as they support Windows Media DRM. Songs can be easily transferred from your PC to the handset by using Windows Media Player or with the new Nokia Music PC client that is expected to be out later this year.

The Nokia Music Store is to be marketed under Nokia's new internet service, called Ovi, meaning 'door' in Finnish. Under Ovi, Nokia is also promoting its new N-Gage mobile gaming service. The N-Gage service - available worldwide by November - allows the user to try all N-Gage games for free, before purchasing and downloading the game through either your mobile device or PC. The new Nokia N81 and Nokia N95 8GB will have the new N-Gage application embedded in them, where as other devices will need to download the application from http://www.n-gage.com.