Nokia has just announced the 5800 will be released in the US and Canada later this year along with its bundled ‘Comes with Music’ unlimited download service. This is Nokia’s first touchscreen device and includes haptic technology that makes the screen vibrate to provide feedback. As their first foray into the touch-screen multimedia phone market, Nokia is pulling out all the stops to capture market share from Apple’s iPhone.
The Nokia music store comes bundled with the price of your subscription and allows you to download any music from their catalog for free. If you ever terminate your contract, the music is still yours to play because you’re downloading DRM-free MP3 files. This prevents issues like the recent Walmart debacle where they shuttered their download store and members of the service could no longer access their libraries.
Nokia is also looking to best Apple in terms of web browsing. The Nokia Tube will be the first phone released with support for Adobe Flash technology, a hot-button issue between Adobe and Apple on the iPhone. This will be the first mobile browser to support Flash technology and could begin to pressure Apple to allow Adobe to release a plugin for the iPhone version of Safari.
This is an aggressive move by the leading global handset manufacturer to capture a portion of the US Smartphone market. The company is hoping to lure users away by including free music downloads and a rich user interface experience. Only time will tell how consumers will react to its release.
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[...] more competition in the form of the first Android phone in the T-Mobile G1, the newly announced Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the iPhone 3G leading in innovation, Microsoft looks to be playing catch-up in a critical [...]