Music to the Nth limit

LAUNCH: Nokia bets big on musical phones, but you must wait for the real fun to begin.

If you think Nokia is defined by the N-series' maze of multimedia imagery, think again. Nokia has turned to music with a passion few suspected it of. Models 5300 and 5200, two of its latest launches, are bascially music phones, even as its twist phone model, 3250, gets a musical upgrade.

The music features are part of XpressMusic, a service sub-brand that hopes to prove as powerful as Sony Ericsson's Walkman in attracting the music buff.

In hardware terms, it means more memory. The 5300 and 3250 are packed with miniSD cards to break free from memory constraints; they can both be installed with up to 2 gigabytes of memory, enough to store 1,500 tracks.

There's more. Nokia envisions people using mobile phones for high-speed net surfing, TV, podcasting, imaging and mobile blogging. "Don't call them phones," insists Jose-Luis Martinez, vice-president, multimedia sales and channel management, Asia Pacific, "they are multimedia computers."

The big boost to mobile music, however, would come once getting music is as easy as getting a phone call. "Eventually," says Nokia's Asia Pacific product marketing director Matt Rothschild, "mobile phones would be capable of downloading music straight from a cellular network without the need for a separate PC."

Today, you can browse the Internet via a mobile phone at an acceptable speed, but you can't download larger files like songs. Networks would get clogged, for one, a problem that third-generation (3G) technology is expected to solve. Assorted details of intellectual property rights (IPRs) need to be worked out before such services kick off, for another.

Anyhow, Nokia is preparing for bigger things to come. Witness, for example, its new website, Music Recommenders, set to debut in November "" and led by none other than the rocker David Bowie, apart from some others.

This effort will complement Nokia's $60 million investment made in August on Loudeye, an online music storefront that competes with similar services of telecom firms.

As convergence intensifies, it's all part of a broad strategy to meet the entertainment consumer's needs.

(This correspondent's trip to Manila for the launch was sponsored by Nokia)