Nokia cheers UK XpressMusic 5800 launch with 1 million sales
As Nokia, like all other handset makers, announced it figures and disappointed investors everywhere, the world's leading handset maker was clearly looking for something to push in the way of success and came up with the fact that the new 5800 XpresssMusic device has already sold 1 million phones the day it came to the UK.
In the UK the device has been used to spearhead Nokia's brand new push into a music formula it calls Comes with Music, whereby the price of any music you download over the next year is free, bundled into the price of the handsets. After a year you get to keep all the music you have downloaded to the phone, and can either buy another year's supply of music or continue to top up by buying tracks one at a time from the local Nokia Music Store.
UK coverage has suggested that other Nokia XpresssMusic phone sales have been waning because of the anticipated arrival of the 5800, previously known under the code name The Tube. It is only launched in the UK today, with queues forming at Nokia stores, which was an artificial effort to bring the phone some much needed publicity, you can't get it anywhere else except at a Nokia Store in the UK for a week, so it's trying to create Apple-like excitement at the launch.
The Nokia flagship stores are Heathrow and in Regent's Street in London and the device is selling for £249. But next week Nokia will begin supplying operator deals with all the majors (after rumours that Vodafone had a three month exclusive - which turns out not to be true). On January 30 the 5800 will be offered by Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, O2, T-Mobile UK, Orange, Phones 4u and Virgin Mobile.
It's hard to know just where Nokia has sold a million of these devices. It has been on sale, but without its Comes with Music service attached, only since November, and then only in Russia, Spain, India, parts of Asia Pacific and the Middle East. Some of these market just aren't suitable - either the market buys too few top end phones and also some networks in these territories are too slow for convenient downloads - so the best should be yet to come for this device.
The UK launch is the critical one, because Nokia needs to see if it can get across a rivalry with the iPhone. Watch out for our hands on review in a few weeks. The 5800 has a touch screen interface, 8GB of memory thrown in, and can store up to 6,000 tracks and all the music you can want is selected from a 5 million track database. But until the bundled services are out next week it will be hard to assess its likely UK success, never mind its likely global penetration.
The UK was supposed to be the first market to get this phone, but it needed extra operator integration here, which took a little longer. Later in 2009 this phone will try the trip to the US, where Nokia is a fairly unknown brand, despite being the global leader in handset supply.
Other early markets were Finland, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Taiwan which either got it in November or are getting it now.
Nokia shipped 468 million handsets in 2008 so that single 1 million 5800 devices represents something like 0.2% of its handset shipments. It usually ships around 140 million devices which can carry and play music each year, A likely expectation within Nokia for this phone would be in excess of 20 million devices during its first year, but of course it has to launch the Nokia Music Store in each country first, and so far it has only managed 12 countries to date; Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the UAE.
The 5800 has a 3.2" widescreen display, including 16 : 9 aspect and can play back video at 30 frames a second. It has a 3.2 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and as with all Nokia top end devices these days, can talk to Ovi, Flickr, or Facebook with one click.
"Comes With Music" first launched on other devices in the UK, including the previous generation music phone the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic device - this phone however has lately plummeted in price to make room for the 5800.
