Review: Comes With Music Service on the Nokia X6

With Nokia's premier music phone starting to spin the decks on many of the major networks, we thought this a perfect time to cover exactly what makes the Nokia X6 32GB worth the extra readies - the Comes With Music download service.

Comes With Music and Nokia's Ovi Player are set to take on iTunes with an interesting alternative method of musical distribution - simply giving it away to paid-up subscribers.

Read on to see whether the Finnish phone maker's innovative offering is music to our ears...

Comes With Music

The premise is beautiful in its simplicity. Buy a 'Comes With Music' device, be it the iPod-bothering Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic or the top-flight X6, and get unlimited access to over 6 million songs...for a certain length of time. For the duration of the licence purchased (anything from 12 to 24 months), users can simply log in to the iTunes-aping Nokia Music Store and download to their heart's content.

However, all the songs downloaded are DRM-ed to the hilt, meaning only one PC (no Mac support, sorry!) and one Comes With Music phone can be supported at a time, as well as a discernible inability to transfer any music to a particular iDevice...

Once the subscription is over, the complete collection of tunes can be kept and are free to be listened to indefinitely. Subscribers are free to peruse and purloin absolutely everything from the Store's ample virtual shelves, from the latest albums from popstrels like Ellie Goulding to some of the biggest stars in the history of music, from Michael Jackson to Johnny Cash.

Strong distribution deals with all the biggest labels mean there are few gaps in the Store, with most music tastes amply catered for. With at least a year to pick and choose music, there's plenty of opportunity to build out a handsome collection of digital anthems before it expires.

However, extending a subscription isn't a matter of buying a gift card and getting back in the game, rather customers are required to buy another Comes With Music device and port their existing account and library across, otherwise the Store reverts to a iTunes clone complete with per-track billing.

Ovi Music Store

Now, being a iTunes clone is hardly a bad thing, with the Music Store's simple and clean layout enabling quick and easy navigation. The home screen showcases the latest albums dynamically with a huge tabbed menu, whilst album art is emblazoned across each page, proving inviting to the casual clicker.

From the home screen the sidebar enables the current top 40 albums and singles can be scoured with ease, as well as the latest releases (the new Gorillaz album was day and date with availability in stores) and the chance to 'rediscover' the cream of artists from yesteryear.

Genres are also exhaustively listed along the sidebar, and the choice of a 30-second sampler or downloading the track is a simple matter of clicking the prominently placed orange buttons beside each song title. Downloading a track produces a discreet progress section to appear at the bottom of the Music Store, showing each song as it is transferred to the PC at blazing fast speeds.

Between 20 and 30 seconds per track resulted in full albums being downloaded in less than 5 minutes, the Store is really fast, and great for those who become addicted to the all-you-can-eat nature of Comes With Music.

The software is also a fully fledged music player, with altogether familiar playback buttons nestled at the top of the interface.

Comes With Music on the Nokia X6

The experience of Comes With Music on Nokia's flagship music phone is markedly different - shorn of the real estate offered by a PC screen, the process is somewhat less elegant but still straightforward, working a treat for getting music on the move.

The mobile version of Nokia Music has a similar layout, showcasing new artists and and the latest tracks, albeit with a significantly smaller selection on display and tiny thumbnails illustrating each artist and album.

Pared down to the essential features, the menu now has navigation and search buttons at the top of the screen, with three buttons at the bottom leading to a barebones main menu, account settings and download progress respectively. Not pretty, but decidedly functional.

The large green button takes you to a list of tracks, each of which have to be clicked on and downloaded individually to the phone.

A little frustrating when attempting to get a 12-plus track album, particularly as the X6 tends to get into a tizz, stuttering a lot when the songs mount up.

Downloads are pretty swift, and look familiar to anyone used to queuing up applications from the Ovi Store. The progress bar at the bottom depicts download progress, and can be performed in the background by pressing the 'hide' button.

However, we found that attempting to perform any other functions whilst tracks were being downloaded often caused a huge strain on the device, causing it to hang on menus and crash on at least one occasion.

We advise patience for the 20-odd seconds it takes to download a track (on wi-fi, expect considerably longer over 3G), and the X6 will be grateful for it.

Once downloaded, however, the Store transitions seamlessly into the X6's media player, each song appearing with correct labels and (sometimes pixellated) album art.

The Store does not use MP3s but rather the WMA format for its output, but the bitrate quality of the audio is impressive, tracks sounding more than good enough to blast out of the X6's speakerphone.

Playing a track is preceded by a couple of seconds where the X6 verifies the DRM as present and correct, then it gets to the business of media playback, which is identical to the device playing music sourced from iTunes or any other location.

Moving music between the PC client and the handset is quick and painless for those unwilling to traverse Comes With Music on the X6's smaller screen, and editing names and images is a cinch to boot.

Summary

All in all, the Comes With music service is an entirely impressive solution to the issue of legal downloading, a relatively liberating where any song from almost any artist can be accessed in seconds, and transferred to a mobile in moments.

The DRM is a necessary evil, giving users the keys to the candy store has to come with caveats, and locking the music to just a single PC and phone is constricting but understandable. It rarely gets in the way...as long as you are adhering with the rules.

The premise of Comes Wth Music is brilliant, and the extra cost is negligible in comparison to the amount of tunes on offer.

The freedom to sample new artists, dabble in foreign genres or simply let yourself be inspired by Nokia Music's intelligent suggestions make the service a brilliant alternative to the nickel-and-dime nature of current digital download outlets.

The torrent (if you'll excuse the pun) of legal tunes the Comes With Music service flows into Nokia phones it a perfect aural accompaniment to an entry-level Xpressmusic device, but we think it may just push the high-end Nokia X6 into prohibitively expensive territory.

A great source of music - both as a player on a home computer and as a place to purchase new content - Nokia needs to relax the security restrictions, iron out the glitches and simply allow more subscribers for Comes With Music to become a legitimate iTunes alternative for the millions of X-series phone owners around the globe.

It's that good.