Nokia is suddenly talking in millions, while Apple tends to talk in billions, when it comes to music, devices and track downloads. But it is still probably significant that Nokia’s new XpressMusic 5800 music handset has already sold over 1 million devices, given that it has not yet been launched in any major markets, at least not in a major way.
Nokia announced the figures as it also announced results which disappointed investors, clearly looking for something to push in the way of success. The device carries the hopes of Nokia’s comeback (if you can call it that) in music, and it was launched this week for the first time with its Comes with Music platform initially only in the UK.
The device has been used to spearhead Nokia’s brand new push into a music formula it calls Comes with Music, whereby the price of any music you download over the next year is free, bundled into the price of the handsets. After a year you get to keep all the music you have downloaded to the phone, and can either buy another year’s supply of music or continue to top up by buying tracks one at a time from the local Nokia Music Store.
We discovered last week that you cannot export music from Comes with Music to a new phone, if it is a non-Nokia device, something which rival Omniphone, with its MusicStation service sold through operators, does allow.
Nokia XpresssMusic phone sales have been slowing down as the world waited for the anticipated arrival of the 5800, previously known under the code name The Tube and in many places being thought of as Nokia’s answer to the iPhone. It is launched in the UK this week, with queues forming at Nokia stores, which was an artificial effort to bring the phone some much needed publicity, because for a week you can’t get it anywhere else except at a Nokia Store in the UK.
The Nokia flagship stores are at Heathrow airport and in Regents Street in London and the device is selling for £249 ($350). But next week Nokia will begin supplying operator deals with all the UK major MNOs. On January 30 the 5800 will be offered by Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, O2, T-Mobile UK, Orange, Phones 4u and Virgin Mobile.
It’s hard to know just where Nokia has sold a million of these devices. It has been on sale, but without its Comes with Music service attached, only since November, and then only in Russia, Spain, India, parts of Asia Pacific and the Middle East. Some of these market just aren’t suitable ‘ either the market buys too few top end phones and also some networks in these territories are too slow for convenient downloads ‘ so the best should be yet to come for this device.
The UK launch is the critical one, because Nokia needs to see if it can get across a rivalry with the iPhone. The 5800 has a touch screen interface, 8GB of memory bundled, can store up to 6,000 tracks and all the music you could want is selected from a 5 million track database at the Nokia Music Store. But until the bundling deals are announced by operators next week it will be hard to assess its likely UK success, never mind its likely global penetration. The US is likely to get the phone later in the year, but probably without the Comes With Music deal, and perhaps without a major operator deal ‘ although this phone certainly has a juicy enough feature set to attract an operator like Verizon, but Nokia doesn’t make CDMA phones, so it can only look to sell it through AT&T Mobility which has the (iPhone) and T-Mobile.
The UK was supposed to be the first market to get this phone, but it was delayed through the need for extra operator integration, which took a little longer. Other early markets were Finland, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Taiwan which either got it in November or are getting it now.
Nokia shipped 468 million handsets in 2008 so that single 1 million 5800 devices represents something like 0.2% of its handset shipments. It usually ships around 140 million devices which can carry and play music each year, A likely expectation within Nokia for this phone would be in excess of 20 million devices during its first year, but of course it has to launch the Nokia Music Store in each country first, and so far it has only managed 12 countries to date, Austrailia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden UK and UAE,
The 5800 has a 3.2 inch widescreen touch sensitive display, including 16 x 9 aspect and can play back video at 30 frames a second. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and as with all Nokia top end devices these days, can do once click transfers to Ovi, Flickr, or Facebook.
‘Comes With Music’ first launched on other devices in Europe, including the previous generation music phone the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic device. However lately this has been plummeting in price to make room for the 5800.