All About Symbian points out this morning that the Nokia Music Store is now live for UK users. Or some UK users anyways. Those with an N95 8GB, N81 or Internet Explorer only. Not me*.

When I visited Nokia in September, I asked the PR person whether purchasing music would be widely available to existing devices, as well as Mac users - since the demo clearly worked fine on Windows in Internet Explorer. She skirted around the existing devices question, but seemed perfectly confident that the store would work happily on a Mac. Not so just yet.

I appreciate that Internet Explorer represents a fair chunk of the population, but Firefox, Safari and other non-IE users probably make up most of the gadget-using crowd they’re targetting - ie. those who use their phones for more than just banal calls. It’s also early days and things will evolve, but universality and ease of use regardless of what device you’re using is something we treat as essential here at Taptu, and I’m surprised it wasn’t a priority for Nokia.

That issue aside, the store looks reasonably good, but is only differentiated from other online stores by the application which comes pre-installed on the new N95 8GB and the N81, as the transfer to mobile needs to be done from a computer on any other Nokia device.

Music on mobile is clearly an area where we’ll see a lot of activity in the next few months, and I’m thrilled to be here to watch it all happen!

[* Yes, I could launch Parallels but that's not the point... ]

From the archives, this is an impromptu video of the Nokia Music Store beta, taken back in September at the Nokia offices in Finland.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Mobile devices, On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.