Mobile Entertainment

At 7pm this morning, UK mobile retailers began selling Nokia’s N81 and N95 8GB music devices. Each is pre-loaded with a link to the Nokia Music Store, from which consumers can download songs, tag tunes and listen to 30-second clips. There’s also an N-Gage link on there too, for connection to Nokia’s own games store.

As most of you will know, this is a very big deal indeed. Not just for Nokia, but for the mobile content business as a whole.
To see exactly why, a little history lesson might be in order.

Back in the early days of WAP, Nokia launched its own games portal called the Mobile Entertainment Service. It trawled Europe to find games developers to fill this pipe with product.

But the whole concept horrified operators, which were trying to do the same with their own nascent WAP decks. So MES quietly died. As did Nokia’s ambitious ideas for Club Nokia shortly afterwards.

Ever since then, the trade has watched and waited for Nokia to give it another shot. When the company bought music infrastructure provider Loudeye last year, it became a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’ Nokia would start to sell content (in this case, music) direct to consumers. This morning the shop door opened.

For those of you that haven’t been paying attention to the details, every N81 and N95 8GB will pre-load the music app. Operators cannot remove it if they perceive conflict of interest. At present the devices have been listed by O2, Voda and SIM-free by The Link and Carphone Warehouse. Nokia concedes not all operators are happy, but is confident a majority will come aboard as the service launches internationally and on new handsets; every forthcoming new Nseries device will pre-load the store.

Look at that last sentence and it becomes clear what an audacious gamble by Nokia this is. Nokia sold 9 million Nseries devices in Q3 2007 alone. That it’s tethering such a 'controversial' concept to this valuable range speaks volumes for Nokia’s boldness. A Nokia insider confided to me that the biggest companies in history are defined by the big decisions they make. Look at IBM, he said. That’s how big this is.

I applaud Nokia and wish it well. There’s no doubt that its strategy and they hype surrounding it can only benefit the content biz as a whole. And, happy to report, the music store is truly deep: it has all kinds of weird jazz on it.