Unofficial Comes With Music Blog

Stuck in musical limbo

Gids — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:09:09 +0000

I have swapped my broken Nokia 5310, for a shiny touchscreen Nokia 5800. But it seems despite sharing the ‘XpressMusic’ badge, Nokia won’t let me transfer over my Comes With Music subscription. It seems the ‘approved‘ list of devices counts only two. The Nokia 5310 and the Nokia N95 8GB.

Hence, the lovely people at Nokia Care refused my request… for the time being at least. They claim that a Nokia 5800 ‘Comes With Music’ phone is in the works, so hopefully when it is released, I’ll be able to claim my handset as ‘compatible’ and they will be able to flick the switch to transfer the licence over. Oh, the joys of DRM!

Transferring your Comes With Music subscription – the lowdown

Gids — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:56:10 +0000

After my Nokia 5310 died spectacularly. I contacted Nokia Care to find out about tranferring my Comes With Music subscription on to another compatible phone. The good news is that it is possible, with the blessing of your Nokia Care friends/overlords:

Here are the requirements to tranfer your subscription, from a Nokia Care email:

You will be able to use Comes With Music on your new device as long as you have a compatible device with a compatible software version.

In order to verify if you have a compatible device, can you please send us the following information:

1)The model number of your new device

2)The serial number of your new device (To view the serial number, enter the code *#06# in the standby mode of your device. To access standby mode, press the red end key on your device)

3)The software version of your device. (To view the software version, enter the code *#0000# in the standby mode of your device. To access standby mode, press the red end key on your device)

4)Your Nokia Music user name

If you fulfil the requirements and provide us with all the information above, we will be able to add your new device to your subscription.

Please note, that if you change your registered device, you will no longer be able do the following with your original mobile device:
-download new Comes With Music content
- transfer already download content from your PC to mobile

Will be trying this out shortly…

What a 5310 shattered screen looks like

Gids — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:37:11 +0000

Hi,

After dropping my phone from my pocket onto some metal grates I can now reveal was a Nokia 5310 with a shattered screen looks like. It was worth it! Anyway, now this phone has died a death, I will need to find another phone which I can copy my licenced music over on to and keep downloading. Sadly the phone has not even lasted the subscription…

Firmware updated blitzed my Comes With Music subscription

Gids — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:30:15 +0000

Oh joy, after updating the firmware on my Nokia 5310 phone, my Comes With Music subscription has been blitzed and any purchased tracks now refuse to transfer.

Screenshot showing Nokia licencing error

The only remedy according to the Nokia troubleshooter is to contact customer care. So with my ticket logged. All that leaves me to do is wait…and think about how horrible DRM only serves to punish paying customers.

And my advice to anyone thinking of running a software update on your Nokia phone, DON’T

My advice to anyone looking to buy a Comes With Music phone: THINK TWICE

Update: After contacting Nokia Care, the solution turned out to be formatting the memory card and then re-syncing from Nokia Music. Of course, this is a hassle I wouldn’t have had if the music wasn’t DRM protected.

Comes with… a firmware update

Gids — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:10:39 +0000

In the rather usual, bloated way of Nokia PC suite, it reported an update was available and proceeded to download a massive patch and re-install the whole shebang including a system restart.

On arrival the updated Nokia PC suite reported a new version of the firmware was available for my Nokia 5310. Yet another 60mb of downloads later, the software update was ready to start, but not before I had done a full phone backup using the PC Suite backup tool.

The firmware update did run successfully (taking a further 20 minutes.) It blitzed the phone content, but not the stuff on the memory card. So I was grateful when my backup restored successfully. Unfortunately, all this effort (total time was around an hour,) still didn’t fix the main software gripe I have with the phone, which is the black flicker in the background of all menus and applications as I scroll using the phone or play a game. What a creaky bug, that seems to affect this Nokia 5310 but not my last one. Oh well…

Comes with… a good Latin selection

Gids — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:34:41 +0000

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the Latin and Spanish language selection available from the Nokia Music Store. I can download tracks from most of the artists I learned to love whilst in Madrid and Mexico. One of the first things I downloaded was the new Amaral double album Gato Negro Dragón Rojo. Soon after I grabbed some great stuff recommended by my Mexican friend, Instituto Mexico de Sonido, which has the sort of Kinobe or Lemon Jelly type dance grooves I love, with great Mexican touches which permeate the album. That lead me on to Radio Zumbido a similar Latino dance groove, but a harsher sound without the magic of El Instituto.

Guess this is the plan working, easy unlimited downloads really are the way to some musical enlightenment!

USB 2.slow

Gids — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:28:37 +0000

How odd it is that my Nokia 5310 only supports the slow version of the USB 2.0 standard. This makes for an exceedingly long sync process with my music. Sometimes it feels like my connection to the web is faster than the wire to my phone. Oh well. Get with the programme Nokia. iPods have supported Hi-Speed USB 2 for years.

Comes with… a forced upgrade

Gids — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:27:15 +0000

So, I plugged in my phone for the first time in a while. After a mammoth re-syncing effort I had some strange tranfer errors. I tried manually dragging files over only to be greeted with a ‘Licencing Error.’ My copy of Nokia Music was due for an upgrade and I couldn’t transfer anything until I ran it.

Welcome to Nokia Music 1.1, whether you like it or not!

Comes without… scrobbling

Gids — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:58:13 +0000

One of the missing features of the Nokia Music program is to scrobble my plays back to my last.fm profile. It is a shame I can’t share what I’m playing with the world, Nokia is really missing out on the social angle here. Maybe it is something that will come with a next generation Comes With Music phone?

Now playing: nothing, sadly not watching Manu Chao live.

Nokia BH-503 Bluetooth Headset review

Gids — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:53:05 +0000

After a while being tempted by the idea, I took the plunge about a month ago and ordered a Nokia BH-503 headset. Having struggled with messy wired headphones previously, I hoped a Bluetooth headset would be the answer and a perfect companion to my Comes With Music phone. But has it fulfilled my hopes so far?

First the good news, the headset is a stylish black and metallic red, that looks more like regular headphones than your classic geeky bluetooth device. I think it’s actually quite stylish, if you can put up with the big pads over your ears!

Nokia BH-503 headset and user manual

Once paired with my Nokia 5310 phone, syncing the devices together is silky smooth. Hold the ‘call’ (multifunction) button for a few seconds. A light flashes green to indicate the headphones are turned on, then it flashes blue to show it has connected to the phone. You’ll also hear a beep from both headset and phone and the phone will light up to tell you the headset is connected.

The buttons on the headset itself make it easy enough to control music playback, whilst I leave the phone in my pocket. The downside is that with no hold-switch, putting a beanie hat on can inadvertently stop the music, or change tracks!

Nokia BH-503 headset controls close-up

The sound quality seems perfect from the phone, save a few occasions when I have been walking briskly and it has skipped a beat, although it soon recovers. The round the neck fit has been robust enough for me to use it in the gym whilst doing sit-ups without any trouble. An incoming call is also no-problem as the discreet microphone kicks in. I haven’t had any complaints about ‘speaking up’ or ‘bad line’ so that’s got to be good.

It also comes with a rather fetching silky pully bag to keep the headset in, Although mine got muddy soon enough!

BH-503 pully bag

Now the bad news, I had intended to use the same headset to listen to audio from my desktop and I got a cheap bluetooth dongle for the purpose. However, this works very poorly. The Laptop and headset can’t seem to handle a high quality stream and fall back to a thing called SBC mode which is a very poor quality stream intended I think for phone calls and bearly good enough for that. So sadly this part of the plan hasn’t worked out for the time being!

So to summarise:

The Good

Smooth and easy sync with the phone
Neck fit works surprisingly well and good enough for the gym
In-line controls mean you can stow the phone away and still control the music

The Bad

No hold-switch means you can inadvertently knock the headset buttons
Still quite large and noticeable, I’m sure the next generation will be slimmer…

The ugly

Works really poorly with my laptop bluetooth dongle, so not good as as a discreet listening option from a Windows PC