Thanks to Vaibhav of The Symbian Blog who today reported that the Nokia Music Store has been launched today, i checked it out the very same moment and it really did open but the only sad part was that its a soft launch and one cannot download the tracks as of now.
The Music Store has a huge homepage and instead of posting all the screen-shots i chose to stitch them up and give the whole home page in a single picture, which is on your left hand side. This is how the store opens on my N96 in portrait mode.
To access the store all you have to do is to open the Music folder in your device and click on the Music Store Icon, alternatively you can also type in music.nokia.com in your device’s web browser and you shall be directed to the Music Store app by the device itself.
The home page has the image of the latest Bollywood movie New York adorning the top, above which you shall find the options to sign in, join, for help and to take you back to the home page. The music store does not work with your standard Nokia account and you need to create a new one for it, which i feel is a let down as Nokia has missed an oppurtunity to merge all it services under one Nokia(Ovi) Account. So this mean you shall need to click Join Now and sign up for the service, which is a hassle free experience.
Below the poster of New York movie one finds the options to search the songs either by artist name or by the song title. Nokia has not only made international music and bollywood music available but has also taken care of regional music.
In my case i searched an old Punjabi song by Gurdas Mann and to my surprise it was available, a big feat considering the CD’s of the very same number are very rare.
Also i was able to serch and find the songs of the old bollywood flick Abhimaan. Seems like Nokia has taken care of the diversity that our country has and made it a point to make the Music on its store appeal to all.
Nice effort Nokia..
Below the search boxes one finds the list of Genre’s . The there’s a featured palylist column having the latest bollywood releases and international releases.
Below that you shall find the Pin redemption icon, about which i am as clueless as you are………..
Once you have found the track you like you shall see three icons near
All in all i am very impressed by the Music Store and seems like Nokia has got at least one store right. I hope that the store shall be sucess and Comes With Music Phones shall soon be a part of Nokia’s line up in India .