“Nokia’s ‘Comes With Music’ service, and while the proposition may appear attractive, it’s already being slammed as ‘fatally flawed’ by some detractors,” Jonny Evans reports for Macworld UK.
“How it works: Nokia Comes With Music offers a year of unlimited access to music all within the Pay As You Go handset cost of £129.95. It launches 16 October,” Evans reports.
“The service allows tracks to be downloaded directly to your computer, from where they can then be transferred to the handset. Downloaded tracks can be kept on the handset or PC – but that’s where the problems begin,” Evans reports.
“Customers must register their PC and their Comes With Music device to their account before any content can be downloaded and content can then only be downloaded/synchronised between the two devices registered to the account at any one time,” Evans reports.
“Once the year’s subscription is complete, customers can keep all of their music – but two years after that one year period, users will be able to keep the content on their current device/PC but will no longer be able to transfer it to other computers,” Evans reports. “And, because the music is shrouded in DRM, they won’t be able to burn it to CD or keep it in some other way – in other words, the music won’t belong to them forever.”
Full article here.
Heavily-DRM’ed music stuck in an old device with a very limited lifespan doesn’t sound at all ‘unlimited’ to us.
