Nokia Announces Three New Handsets and Launches Music Store

Nokia is rolling out the big guns with plenty of announcements for upcoming mobiles and music services. Nokia had already announced the launch of the 5530 and 5230 XpressMusic handsets only yesterday and now once again here in good ole’Mumbai. No big news here except for the totally outrageous pricing that was announced for the 5230 which is pretty much the twin brother if the 5800 minus the Wi-Fi and the 8GB bundled card (2GB provided) and Nokia even shaved off a few megapixels giving it a 2MP camera. The price was slated to be about Rs. 10, 400 (149 EURO) which is just brilliant, if it’s consistent with the price when actually launched. The 5530, the smaller sleeker touchscreen handset will be priced at approximately the same.

5230 XpressMusic

Also announced today was the 5630 XpressMusic, the non touchscreen handset form the trio. It features -
2.2-inch TFT LCD (240 x 320 pixels)
a 3 megapixel camera AF camera (LED flash)
N-Gage Gaming support
MicroSD card support (up to 16GB) and a 4GB of card included
3.5mm earphone socket
Wi-Fi
EDGE/GPRS, 3G (HSDPA)
Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0
FM radio with RDS

5630 XpressMusic

The most important announcement was the launch of the Nokia Store for India and the Comes with Music initiative. As of now only a few handsets will support the same and older users will have to wait which is the worst part. They’ve taken their sweet time with this launch and it still isn’t ready for their entire user base. However, over 3 million songs from all genres and languages are available. Users will be allowed to sample music (30 seconds) before downloading directly onto their devices. The problem is, we don’t yet have the bandwidth to actually download tracks at a decent enough speed.

5530 XpressMusic

As of now all new XpressMusic handsets, a few N-Series and E-Series devices will come with bundled with vouchers that range from Rs. 10 to Rs. 100 (approx). The list of devices are as follows – N97, N86, E71, E63, 5800 XpressMusic, 5130 XpressMusic, 5530 XpressMusic and the Nokia 7210.

The official launches of the handsets will be available somewhere in the fourth quarter and we’ll see what the official pricing is then.