Open Warrior

When I first got news of the Nokia Music Store in South Africa I was really excited – finally an online music store which would allow me to buy local content without needing to have iTunes, because as a Linux user iTunes just isn’t an option. One day I was walking on campus and people were handing out pamphlets with information about the Nokia Music Store and how one can use it to buy music. I read the pamphlet and my excitement about the Nokia Music Store dropped to complete disappointment. There were two main reasons for this:

1. The music is in WMA format and makes use of DRM – this effectively means that I can’t play it on any operating system other than Microsoft Windows and that I can’t put it on my iPod. This alone renders the service completely unuseable to me.
2. The Nokia Music Store website only works with Internet Explorer. According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer accounts for about 66% of browser use on the Internet. By only supporting Internet Explorer, Nokia effectively prevents about 34% of their potential market from accesing their site.

The two issues mentioned above basically render the Nokia Music Store useless to computer users like me who don’t use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. I’m a big fan of Nokia and the work that they do, though I really believe they got it wrong with their online music store. Either way, I can only hope that they’re aware of this and are working towards improving the service so that all computer users can make use of it without the restrictions.