In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, music phones are hot. But simple usability, clear directions and “out of the box” pleasures have varied across the industry, according to analysts.
Those two assertions explain, in part, the arrival of Nokia Corp.’s 5300 XpressMusic handset at T-Mobile USA Inc. a few weeks ago. The handset sells online for $100 with a two-year contract. And the success the two partners have had in developing and presenting this handset may well explain why the 5300 in black was temporarily out-of-stock to online shoppers last week. (The other version is lilac in color.)
The handset represents a mid-tier win in a growing handset market segment for Nokia in the United States, where it continues to under-perform in relation to its global dominance. The 5300 also expands the Nokia portfolio at T-Mobile USA, where the existing portfolio from the Finnish vendor is lower-tier.
Easy to use
“The most astonishing thing about this music phone is its quick-start guides, one for the phone, one for the music player,” said Avi Greengart, analyst at Current Analysis, tongue planted partly in cheek. “It even includes clear direction on how to sideload music from your PC.”
“The 5300 clearly is designed to provide a half-decent music experience, and that’s rare,” Greengart added. “I think we’ll see more of that at CTIA (Wireless 2007). This is the way the market is going.”
Indeed, a research report released last week by M:Metrics was headlined: “Mobile Music Usage is Climbing, But Not All Music Phones are Created Equal.” The gist: If music phones are defined as handsets that store and playback music-the broadest possible definition-the U.S. uptake lags behind the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain and France, but the U.S. market grew 385 percent between January 2006 and January 2007. The hitch: only a handful of models are designed specifically for music.
According to Nokia, high-end music features are getting driven down into the mid-tier, such as its Series 40 phones, to which the 5300 belongs.
“The 5300 is optimized for music and at a more accessible price point for a younger audience,” said Keith Nowak, a Nokia spokesman. “This is a mid-market device for music enthusiasts who can spend $100.”
The vendor’s XpressMusic brand means that consumers will get a good “out of the box” experience, Nowak said, because the handset includes headphones, a 1 gigabyte memory card and a handful of pre-loaded tunes. The handset handles numerous music formats from MP3 to more compressed formats.
“It’s a consumer promise that whatever music you want to run on this device, you can,” Nowak said. “It has dedicated music keys and stereo headphones as well.”
Such features are likely to show up in more of Nokia’s mid-tier lineup at U.S. carriers, Nowak said. The vendor’s basic phones play music, but don’t push that functionality to the fore, according to the spokesperson. At the high end, sold only through independent retailers, are handsets such as the N91, retailing at around $600.
T-Mobile USA benefits
The explicit sideloading instructions are well-suited to T-Mobile USA, whose GSM network is not yet fast enough to support over-the-air downloads, Greengart said. T-Mobile USA was unable to provide a spokesperson in time to comment for this article.
In Greengart’s view, the 5300’s storage capacity-a 1 GB card is included, users can buy a 2 GB card-is the equivalent of an Apple Inc. iPod Shuffle. According to the analyst, carriers limit the amount they’re willing to spend on their subsidized portfolios to provide lots of memory out-of-the-box, basing their model on the consumer electronics’ segment for digital cameras, rather than digital music players.
Greengart concluded that the 5300 is “a good phone, a good music experience, at a reasonable price,” though he doubted that Nokia’s current position in the U.S., which is based on its low-end handsets, would confer any brand benefits on T-Mobile USA.
“If T-Mobile advertises this phone, it could have a competitive impact on other products that provide a similar out-of-box experience,” the analyst said.
Nowak, however, said that Nokia is indeed well-known for quality in the U.S. and that improving the vendor’s lineup at T-Mobile USA would benefit the carrier.
