Mobile Business Magazine - Nokia planning to take on iTunes?

Mobile Business Magazine - Nokia planning to take on iTunes?: "Nokia planning to take on iTunes? PDF Print E-mail
Thursday, 10 August 2006
Nokia Logo - Mobile Business MagazineNokia and Loudeye have announced that they have signed an agreement for Nokia to acquire Loudeye for approximately $60 million.

'Music is a key experience for Nokia and Nokia Nseries multimedia computers and we want to be able to offer the best fully integrated mobile music experience to our customers. Loudeye brings a number of key assets to Nokia, including a great team of people, a substantial content catalogue and a robust service platform that will help us to achieve this objective,' said Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president and general manager, Multimedia, Nokia. 'People should be able to access all the music they want, anywhere, anytime and at a reasonable cost. With this acquisition, we aim to deliver that vision and a comprehensive music experience to Nokia device owners during 2007.'

I don't think Nokia have a chance in hell of competing with i-tunes. For one, memory on phones is still expensive for the majority of un web savvy bargain hunters. Sony E leads the way with walkman phones. Sounds repro on a Nokia is a far cry from Sony's K and M range devices IMHO.

The major stumbling block is getting the music to the phone. If you're smart, you'll throw on the tune from a CD. What you need is a player that plays more compression encoding's. What SUX about MP3 is that if you own the tune or an album you cannot trade up to a proper recording. MP3 is the place to be now. In 5 years with better quality compression or more than likely more storage, you'll listen to your ripped MP3 collection and wonder how bad it was reproduced. Those who had a sony walkman casette player will testify how they used to hear the tape hissing in the background.

Nokia's best at making cool interfaces and quality smartphones. This diversification only complicates the buying process and as such, the over hyped multimedia pastiche is just that - hype. Nokia should really IMHO, concentrate on making quality 1st version OSes for phones. Rather than alledgedly shaky ones that are rushed.