Nokia launches Comes With Music service surprises

So we've been waiting for an official announcement of Nokia's Comes With Music for a while, but yesterday it was made public with a launch date of the 16th October

The concept behind Nokia's Comes With Music all-you-can eat service has been around for a while, but yesterday full details were revealed.

The unlimited music download service will first be available on the Nokia 5310, for a pretty spectacular price of £130 on prepay.

With Comes With Music, you can download as many tunes as you wish via the Nokia MusicStore or the Nokia Music PC suite (sorry Mac users!). After you've had the handset, you can keep all the music you've dowloaded without paying a single penny extra.

So, sounds pretty good, right?

Well, here come the nasty bits.

Like most music services out there, all of the music downloaded is nicely sealed with DRM (Digital Rights Management), which means you won't be able to move your tunes onto any other device other that the phone and the PC associated with your subscription. You are allowed to change your associated phone or PC every three months, but it's still relatively annoying. DRM also means that you can't burn anything onto CDs without paying extra licensing rights, and so the price of the so-called 'free' music service racks up.

Secondly, after the 12 months (or 18 months if you go for buying a Comes With Music handset on a pay monthly deal), you may be able to keep the downloaded music, but if you want to carry on downloading, you'll have to fork out more money for another subscription, rather than extending the sub you already had.

At the moment, the three handsets that will become available with Comes With Music will be the 5310 XpressMusic (old), the Nokia N95 8GB (also old), and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (well, if you're willing to wait until next year). Where are the nice new handsets with this built-in feature for people who want something a little more exciting?

Another interesting point we discovered after checking out the Carphone Warehouse website where you can purchase the device, is that there's a disclaimer announcing that 'depending on demand and network approval this handset may not be ranged by The Carphone Warehouse'. Interesting, as Carphone has an exclusive deal to sell the handset. Does this mean no networks have agreed to release the 5310 Comes With Music? We'll just have to wait until the 16th October to find out.

So although the concept is great, there's still a way to go until the service will have the takeup we think Nokia is expecting.

To see what we really think about the service, check out our review later in the month.