Music Ally

Nokia has been claiming that its first Comes With Music phone has been a big hit with mums, but there’s an increasing amount of evidence that sales of the 5310 XpressMusic have been below expectations.

UK retailer Carphone Warehouse has just slashed the price of the handset by a third in an effort to shift stock, while The Times’ report quotes more analysts suggesting that sales have been disappointing.

Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan suggests CWM simply needs more time and consumer education. We agree, but also think the 5310 itself isn’t a hugely appealing handset, and suspect sales may pick up once more attractive phones are being sold with CWM on-board.

Check out our first impressions of the 5310 and Comes With Music, when we tested it last October.

Earlier this week, Nokia announced its launch plans for Comes With Music, with the 5310 XpressMusic handset due to go on sale through Carphone Warehouse in the UK next month. The fact that the phone was on a pay-as-you-go contract, with users responsible for all data charges, made us wonder what this would mean for over-the-air downloads.

Well, there’s a simple answer for that: users won’t be able to do them. Nokia has confirmed to Music Ally that the 5310 WON’T support OTA downloads for Comes With Music – meaning users will have to download and sync tracks via their PCs instead. Therefore, Nokia will be pitching the service as a PC-based one, at least in this first iteration, until more handsets are available.

Simon Ainslie, MD of Nokia UK, tells us that the company has “agreed ways of working with most of the operators, and contracts [are] in place”, although he’s not saying who just yet. But he’s bullish. “This is not a test, it’s the full launch. We’re going to be very loud and very big about it as we head into the Christmas period.”

The full article is in this week’s issue of the Music Ally Report, where we get an operator’s take on Comes With Music, and investigate whether it can compete with Apple’s iPhone in the hype wars.

As you’ll have seen from our earlier post, Nokia announced that its Comes With Music service will launch next month in the UK, with a special-edition 5310 handset to be sold through Carphone Warehouse on pay-as-you-go contracts.

Now Carphone Warehouse has announced some of the small print, revealing that users will be responsible for all data charges incurred from using the service (which, if they download tracks over the air on pay-as-you-go data rates, could be steep). It’s also given more details on what happens when users’ Comes With Music 12-month subscription expires, in terms of keeping their tracks.

The full ‘Notes To Editors’ section of Carphone’s press release is pasted in over the jump: check it out by clicking the link below.

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Nokia has confirmed that its long-awaited Comes With Music service will launch in the UK next month, in advance of a European and Asian rollout next year. The first Comes With Music handset will be the 5310, which will be sold to pay-as-you-go customers in UK retailer Carphone Warehouse. They’ll then get unlimited music downloads for a year, after which time they will  have to upgrade their handset to continue  (more…)