Nokia brings iPhone competitor to U.S., but will it come with music?

Nokia on Thursday announced plans for a global launch of its new 5800 XpressMusic, its touch-screen, multimedia answer to Apple’s iPhone. A first iteration will be launched in the fourth quarter of this year, and a second featuring Nokia’s Comes With Music platform will hit overseas shelves in early 2009. The U.S. is also scheduled to debut the 5800 in the first half of 2009, but it won’t necessarily come with music.

Nokia confirmed to Reuters that it would launch its Comes With Music platform in the U.S. early next year. The handset maker also said it would launch the 5800 in the U.S. in 2009, but according to a Nokia spokesperson, they have not indicated whether the 5800 will be the vehicle for the music store’s domestic debut.

Rather than focus solely on user interface design in an already crowded touch-screen marketplace, Nokia is placing its bets on Comes With Music, officially launched yesterday in the U.K. The service offers one year of unlimited downloads from the Nokia Music Store catalogue, which holds millions of tracks from the four major record labels. After the year is up, consumers will be able to keep all their downloaded songs. The business plans runs counter to Apple’s strategy of charging for songs downloaded to iTunes and has the potential to threaten wireless operators’ other pay-for-download music services as well.

Nokia has already been in the process of redefining its image a pure handset manufacturer to a services-oriented company with its Ovi platform, and 5800 Xpress Music reinforces that strategy. The touch-screen handset features a drop-down menu called Media Bar to access music and entertainment and link to the Web to access and share Flash content, as well as a socially inspired Contacts Bar that highlights favorite contacts on the home-screen and provides easy access to a digital RSS feed-style history of recent activity. The multi-modal user interface allows users to switch between a touch-screen keypad, Qwerty keyboard, pen stylus or plectrum, a guitar pic for the musically inclined.