Anybody that follows the mobile industry needs to be pretty adept at deciphering doublespeak (and a well-tuned BS detector helps too). But this quote is off the charts. Gizmodo points out how a Nokia spokesman explained the delay of the N91 music phone:
“‘The process of integrating Windows digital rights management solution into the phone happened faster than expected,’ the spokesman said. ‘We have therefore decided to delay the launch so that we can provide a better service.’”
Color me confused. Reuters has a little better one from somebody else, that pretty much sounds like it contradicts the first one: “What we basically decided is that we will postpone it a few weeks, push it out to Q1 and do this Microsoft DRM implementation solidly.” Hmm. That doesn’t really clear things up, either.
In any case, implementation of the Microsoft DRM is the sticking point. This is the DRM licensed in a deal announced back in February, a few months before the N91 was announced. It’s hard to believe Nokia’s had this much trouble getting the DRM to work on its Series 60 software, but if it is such a pain, why use it at all?
As Gizmodo also mentions, the pretty horrible reception the ROKR has gotten seems a more likely culprit. But if the N91 is as good as Nokia wants us to think, why not bring it out according to plan and essentially say “this is how it should be done”?
Image from Buzzword, the board game.
i think it’s even more telling that nokia has copied moto’s approach exactly and instead of announceing a hot music phone this year, has instead slightly modified a tired, 1.5 year old phone with some new music software to launch now. the nokia 6630 music master or music whatever is such a weak attempt at filling in a gap that i don’t even know what to say. except yah. why didn’t they just drop the janus drm and launch the n91?
I don’t agree. Janus enables portable subscriptions, which are a pretty major feature. Back at the N91 announcement, Nokia made some statements to the effect that Janus support would not be available at launch, but would be available via a later firmware upgrade.
It sounds like what’s happened is that they weren’t expecting Janus integration to be done until, say, June 2006. It wouldn’t make sense to delay the N91 that long.
BUT, if Janus integration is done by January or February 2006, it makes a lot more sense for them to delay launch so that they can have this feature from the get-go, rather than force a firmware upgrade later on.
As far as difficulty of implementation, Janus is non-trivial. Portable subscriptions are pretty complex. That’s the reason there are currently so few portable players that have full PlaysForSure certification. I don’t think Nokia’s having any more trouble than anyone else is in this regard.
I dunno — phones like the Audiovox SMT 5600 (which is the HTC somethingorother) can already use portable subscriptions that use Janus. They haven’t exactly set the world on fire, and neither have subscription plans in general.
Still, I won’t necessarily disagree with you on the complexity argument, which underlines my question of how DRM is really helpful.