There have been plenty of rumors going around that Nokia is going to announce its own music download service at an event in London at the end of the month, along with some new music-focused devices. The fact that the event’s at the famed Ministry of Sound club was a big hint, but in case there was any question, Nokia has announced today that it will support Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM in its S60 and Series 40 devices. PlayReady replaced the previous Windows Media DRM, which Nokia already supported in some devices, and it would appear that it will be the DRM used in the new download service.

This isn’t big news on its own, or particularly surprising, but it got me thinking a bit. The PlayReady support is just a bit of software, so it will be interesting to see if Nokia makes it available for existing phones, or will only support it on new models. This hints at a bigger potential question — when will Nokia and other handset vendors start making more features available for their smartphones via software?

Over at The Register, Andrew Orlowski recently delivered a pretty scathing indictment of the company’s latest Communicator, the E90. Without delving into the merits of that particular device, one of the points he makes is that the company’s segmentation of its device unit into Multimedia and Enterprise divisions led to some peculiar choices about particular handsets’ features. Even though the company’s E-Series and N-Series devices use the same S60 platform, they have vastly different feature sets. This is understandable, to a certain extent, but it also indicates that the company didn’t believe in much crossover between users’ professional and personal lives. For instance, N-Series devices don’t have the same level of support for push email systems as the E-Series, while the enterprise devices don’t have the same level of multimedia functionality.

When so much of this functionality is just software, though, wouldn’t handset manufacturers be better off letting users further customize their devices by installing the features they want? That way, a user’s not forced to make the choice between, say, getting an E-Series device just so they can use their corporate BlackBerry system, and getting an N-Series device that’s got the camera they really want. Obviously there’s a commercial incentive for a handset vendor to differentiate, but enough of that differentiation can be done with form factor and hardware. Too often users are forced to compromise when they’re choosing a new device; letting them easily add software features to a device with the form factor and hardware features of their choice would certainly seem like a better way forward — and deliver on some of the supposed promise of standardized smartphone platforms.

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