2 years ago, at the Nokia: Go Play event in London, Nokia announced the Nokia Music Store, along with the Nokia Music PC Client and a few other things. At that event, during a demo of the Nokia Music PC Client (which, btw, wouldn’t be released to the public for another 10 months), the person giving the demo said something I’ll never forget, “Nokia is focused on music because it’s a universal product. Everyone listens to *some* sort of music.” It’s true, too – you’d be hard pressed to find someone who flat out doesn’t enjoy listening to music. Unfortunately, like most other things, Nokia can’t seem to execute on that belief.
Case in point, the Nokia N97. This bad boy is the flagship Nseries, which is Nokia’s multimedia-focused product line. The N97 features 32GB of built-in storage, a standard 3.5mm audio port for using your own headphones, a SOLID pair of stereo speakers, and even Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP support for stereo headphones. Its large 3.5-inch touchscreen display features a user-friendly music player, with album art support, as well as a graphic equalizer and other necessary features. As a stand-alone device, it’s really pretty nice. Unfortunately, when added to the mix of a complete music experience, it’s ghastly.
The Problem
Nokia hasn’t put much thought into the fact that most people don’t listen to music entirely on their device. With growing music libraries, most of us store the bulk of our digital music on our computers, and we also use our computers like we used to use boomboxes – when we’re at home, we listen to music there. As such, the desktop music experience is a key factor in the overall music experience. The mobile music experience is also important, but it has to mesh properly with the desktop, and this is where Nokia drops the ball.
If you look at iTunes or Windows Media Player, both are designed with a huge focus on a pleasant desktop music experience, with an additional focus on making it easy to transfer music between the mobile and desktop spheres. Both allow you to rate music on either mobile or desktop, and sync those ratings back to the other. They also both track the number of times a track has been played, along with the date and time of those plays. This is insanely important for the full music experience, and is part of the disconnect that Nokia is experiencing.
I have 7 auto playlists setup to synchronize with my Nokia N97, for a total of 4363 tracks, or roughly 25GB of music. These auto playlists are really important, because with a 100GB library, they allow me to keep my music fresh. Each is designed to auto-refresh itself with music that I haven’t played in the past 30 days. I sync these to my phone so that when I’m out and about, I have new music to listen to. Unfortunately, since my phone doesn’t record playcounts, it is unable to tell MediaMonkey that I’ve now listened to that track, and that it should replace it with another, older track.
In similar fashion, ratings are important because they help me keep my library maintained. Ratings allow me to specify whether a track is good, poor, or in the middle. While Nokia’s PC Music Client allows me to assign ratings on my computer, those are still not copied over to my phone, nor am I able to change them on my phone. This defeats the entire purpose of ratings, since I cannot adjust them when I’m listening to the song itself.
The other disconnect comes when you try to put music on the phone. There are basically 2 options you can use to load up the N97 with tunes en masse from your computer’s music library – Mass Storage mode and Media Transfer mode. I choose to use MediaMonkey for both, since it’s what I use to manage my desktop music experience, with auto playlists, tagging support, and other niceties.
Loading Music On The Phone
In Mass Storage mode, things are transferred rather quickly, in 1-2 hours. That’s a long time, but for 25GB, it’s pretty solid, and comparable to other MP3 players, such as an iPod or Zune. The ridiculous part, of course, comes after all my music is transferred to the phone. For whatever unbelievable reason, Symbian is the only platform I’ve ever used that requires you to ‘Refresh the Library’ manually. This is a painful process whereby the phone sucks up your precious battery life by re-indexing your *entire* storage, to discover if you’ve changed any music. Refreshing a library of 25GB took my N97 right around 4 hours, and I wish I was exaggerating.
In Media Transfer mode, as any good Nokian will quickly inform you, you don’t have to refresh your library, and they would be right. Luckily, MediaMonkey also supports Media Transfer mode, so I was able to still synchronize the same 4363 tracks, or 25GB, to the phone in Media Transfer mode, to compare speeds. I started the transfer at 3pm, and at 10pm, a whopping 7 hours later, had only transferred 3620 out of 4363 tracks to the phone. Doing the math, that comes to roughly 8.5hours to transfer the full 25GB of music. As promised, though, I did not have to Refresh the Library in order for all those tracks to show up.
So, from the company who is focused on music because it’s a universal product, they’ve completely missed the boat on the full mobile-desktop music experience, and have also missed the boat when it comes to loading my phone up with music in the first place. Even if the phone did support ratings and playcounts and had a ‘prettier’ music player, if it takes me a full workday to load it up with music, those factors won’t count for much, will they?
Conclusion
Anyone on Nokia’s music team should be completely embarrassed by this experience. The top-of-the-line phone in Nokia’s multimedia arsenal should not take 7+ hours to synchronize 25GB of music from my computer, period. The result is that I have music on my phone, and I have music on my computer, and according to Nokia, those are completely separate and disjointed. Nevermind the fact that both Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile smartphones are able to offer a complete desktop-to-mobile-and-back-again music experience. The world’s largest manufacturer of MP3 players, who is supposedly super-dedicated to mobile music, can’t understand that we listen to music on our computers, too, and need for that to be included in our music experience.
I’ve chatted with Mark Wheatley, who is in charge of the Nokia Music PC Client a few times, and expressed this to him. While he agrees, the team is still updating the client without the ability for me to create autoplaylists, as well as a number of other common place features in other music players. However, his team is not the only one to blame. The iPod ecosystem has been around for years, and yet Symbian still doesn’t record playcounts or ratings on the phone itself. Nokia likes to brag that they’re the world’s largest manufacturer of digital music players, but they’ve completely missed the boat in terms of a truly enjoyable mobile music experience.
Suggested Solutions
So, what can Nokia do to fix this? For starters, the Nokia Music PC Client needs to use less resources, and be more lightweight. It should be written with the assumption that I’m going to leave it running on my computer all day long. It needs to be written so that it’s reasonable to expect that I would use it as my only desktop music application. Look at iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and MediaMonkey. They’re full featured, moderately lightweight, and could realistically be used as a full-time desktop media player.
Second, Nokia and Symbian need to update the music player on the phone. While I don’t really mind the interface, it would be nice if I didn’t have to click 8 times to activate repeat and shuffle modes. It also desperately needs to support ratings and playcounts, and be able to sync those back to my computer. This is crucial to the full circle music experience. The music player application also needs to be updated so that there is zero delay when I click to skip to the next track, and it needs to automatically pause the music when I disconnect my headphones.
Most importantly, Nokia and Symbian have *got* to figure out how to make loading music onto my phone faster, specifically if they intend to continue increasing the amount of onboard storage in the phone. Today, when I went to add an additional 361 tracks to my N97, in Media Transfer mode, after 16 minutes, only 5 of those tracks had actually been transferred. That’s completely embarrassing.
These may sound like small complaints, but it’s the little things that really count. Nearly any phone on the market today with a memory card slot is able to play back MP3s, sort them by Artist, Album, and Genre, and some even allow you to build playlists on the phone – these features were once stand-out on Symbian, but now, they’re common place. If you look at the entire S60 music experience (desktop-to-mobile-and-back-again) 3 years ago and today, they’re pretty similar. I’ve used a handful of feature phones, Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry phones, and not a single one required me to refresh my library, ever, nor did they take anywhere near as long to load up music.
I think Nokia has the pieces to really rock the digital music ecosystem, but they have *got* to remember that it doesn’t revolve around the phone, but rather it’s a balance between the phone and desktop, and they’ve got to master both sides of that equation if they want to be successful.
