Nokia N96 now comes with music

The Finnish phone maker’s flagship N96 phone has just had a musical make over, with a bolt on in the form of the Comes With Music edition.

It’s available through London’s Regent Street Nokia store from next week, or right now from the online store here at the princely sum for £540 SIM free.

Besides having BBC iPlayer access and the features Ovi brings, it can now have the free unlimited music downloads from the Nokia Music Store. A store that has a very rich collection of over 3 million tracks to chose from, keep and play to your ears content – with more appearing on the horizon.

Nokia’s normal N96 runs it at £480 as compared to the CWM version. For that £60 premium you have to balance it up if it’s worthwhile in terms of the musical content, as nothing else extra is added. We would have thought they’d have thrown in an 8GB microSD card, but sadly no. Although all the tracks are actually legal, and the artists are being paid for their work so there’s the goodwill feel good factor.

The music service is already on their 5310 XpressMusic handset and N95 8GB, along with the soon to be seen 5800 due for shipping. With the likelihood of more phones in the future having the Comes With Music service added all being very high indeed, if this is successful.

Surely Apple must be quaking in their little white shoes by now, as the risk to iTunes must be mighty. All that it needs is for the store to be expanded to accommodate TV episodes and Movies for them to be running for the hills screaming ‘run away, run away’.