3 officially joins Nokia’s music bundle

Comes With Carphone Warehouse - or does it?

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 24th October 2008 15:51 GMT

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Mobile operator 3 confirmed that it’s the first UK network to offer Nokia’s Comes With Music bundle directly to punters. Carphone Warehouse claims the right to be the UK’s exclusive retail partner for the deal – but 3 has a chain of around 150 stores.

How do they stack up? Carphone offers the Nokia 5310 Music Edition for £25 a month or the Nokia N95 8GB for £40 a month. Either gets you 200 minutes of airtime and “unlimited” texts. 3 offers 300 minutes of talktime and 1GB of data for £35 a month.

With either vendor, an 18-month contract is mandatory for the free phone, although Carphone offers a pre-pay option with the 5310, in which case you pay £129 for the handset. Over the air access isn’t unlimited though: that 1GB effectively limits your downloads to around 300 a month. But the sideloading option, 3 was keen to stress, was “unlimited”.

Carphone’s bundle is in the stores already, while 3’s commences a week Monday on November 3.

Nokia is keen to stress that “access is unlimited”, and that all songs downloaded will be kept, albeit shackled in DRM.

We’ll bring you a review next week. ®

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