Nokia's just opened an online music store in Australia, à la iTunes. Some news sites are even going so far as to dub it an "iTunes Killer". Unlikely.
I decided to check it out, to see if the claims held any water. Alas, I was greeted by disappointment. The Nokia Music Store fails on three fronts -- two of them are absolute deal-breakers. Firstly, it doesn't support Firefox. But that's fine, we'll just fire up IE (sorry, Mactards!).
Go ahead and try to buy some music. You'll be greeted by a lovely message telling you that you "need" to install an ActiveX control "Nokia Music Bar" in order to buy and play music. Install software to buy music? Are you serious?
That's about as far as I got. There's no way I'm installing Nokia spyware on any computer I own.
The third problem with Nokia's Music Store is that music you pay for is encumbered by DRM. In this day and age? How does Nokia seriously hope to compete with Apple's iTunes by providing the exact same service, at (basically) the exact same price, with a poorer customer experience?
Comments
Hey, that's the default for iTunes, and mandated (!?!) by Microsoft's "Zune Store" and their other semi-abandoned, incompatibly-DRMed one. But amen. Amazon and Wal-mart are (unemcumbered) MP3-only, yay.