Vodafone signs up MusicStation mobile music service to battle iTunes / Nokia Music Store

omnifone-musicstation-vodafone.jpgIt’s safe to assume Vodafone HASN’T got the iPhone, then. The company has announced an exclusive deal with Omnifone to launch the latter’s MusicStation subscription service in the UK for Christmas.

It’ll cost £1.99 a week for unlimited music downloads, with the MusicStation application being preloaded on new Vodafone handsets, but also working with existing phones too (presumably you’ll be able to download the application from Vodafone’s Live portal).

First hands-on impressions of the Nokia Music Store

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At today’s Go Play event, Nokia announced its new Nokia Music Store service (see the earlier story and liveblog for full details). In the afternoon, I got hands on with the web and mobile versions, to see how they’re shaping up.

First, some factual info that didn’t come out in the earlier press conference:

– The DRM-protected tracks will be WMA files encoded at 192kbps. Initially, it’s using Microsoft’s old Windows Media DRM, but in the future, there’s scope to switch to the newer PlayReady system (you might remember, a couple of weeks ago, Nokia and Microsoft signed a deal to work together on the latter).