Entries from December 2008 ↓

It’s official. The 5800 XpressMusic is hitting Malaysian shores come early January 2009. Considering that this is the first S60 touchscreen phone from Nokia, I’m pretty sure there are quite a number of people who are just waiting to get their hands on it. DC’s initial complaints about the 5800 aside I would really like to get my hands on this baby one more time and give it a run. Hopefully it won’t disappoint.

So I was loading up the Nokia Music Player to look for some songs to download (more on my experiences with that and the Nokia Music Store in a future post), and I notice the little button labeled ‘Comes With Music’, as you can see in the picture above. Look to where the big red arrow is pointing, if it isn’t too obvious. Now, the last time I loaded the NMP app on my home PC was a couple of months back when the app was still at V1.0. Just a few minutes ago, the app prompted me to download and install an update, which brought me to V1.1, and the Comes With Music button, which I hadn’t seen until today.

In brief, Comes With Music is basically a subscription service attached to a particular device (with the Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic being one of the first devices to sport the service). This service allows you to download and listen to just about any track available in the Nokia Music Store library, for a full year. Once the subscription ends, all the tracks downloaded are yours to keep on your PC and your Comes With Music device.

Clicking on the button lead me to a promo splash page, touting the awesome and |337 revolution that the Comes With Music initiative would bring to the mobile music scene, and the statement that the service would be available in Singapore real soon. More than likely this is to coincide with the official retail release of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. Maybe during the first few weeks of 2009, perhaps?

While working sets of the 5800 XpressMusic have already been made available through export channels not directly affiliated with Nokia Singapore (see here for a good example), this is a launch i’m really looking forward to; not so much to try out a market-ready release of the 5800, but also how well the Comes With Music service works.

The web’s all abuzz with Nokia’s announcement of their new flagship mobile device, the Nokia N97, at the 2008 chapter of Nokia World, which is currently ongoing in Barcelona.

Digging through the live feed, press release and other information available, here are some of the more standout specifications that Nokia crams into the N97:

• 32GB of on-board storage; a microSD slot enables even more. 16GB cards are already shipping, and we should be seeing 32GB cards in a matter of months.
• 16:9 touchscreen display, with 640×360 pixel resolution, 3.5″ in size; the screen on the N97 is a smidge larger than on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic for example, but has the same resolution and aspect ratio.
• QWERTY keyboard; this combined with the onscreen virtual keyboard should make typing a cinch in just about any situation. Finally, blogging on the go will be the seamless, hassle free process that every mobile blogger dreams about.

Other features include 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, DVD-quality (really?) video capture, HSDPA, GPS and WLAN. Continue reading →