Nokia launches X2 music phone and Ovi Music Unlimited service in India

Nokia is on a roll. After releasing a bunch of new phones and the flagship N8, the company is now stepping it up in the 'mobile music' segment as it unveiled the X2 music phone and the Ovi Music Unlimited service in India.

Nokia X2

The XpressMusic series of phones has been making waves for some time now, and Nokia seems to be slowly rebranding it to the 'X' series. The new X2 is a candybar handset in the same line as the popular Nokia 5310 and the Nokia 5130, sporting a 2.2-inch screen, 48MB of internal memory and a microSD slot (up to 16GB), dedicated music keys, 3.5mm headphone jack, stereo FM radio and all the other features you would look for in a music-oriented phone.

The company hasn't skimped on the camera either, throwing in a 5-megapixel sensor with autofocus and LED flash. Nice! There's no 3G or Wi-Fi here to jack up the price, and you'll have easy connectivity with your PC via Bluetooth (with A2DP) or the microUSB port.

Along with all this, the battery life of the phone is tremendously impressive as it claims over 13 hours of talk-time, 27 hours of music playback and 26 days of standby time. Wow!

What had us going gaga over this phone was the incredible price. Expected to retail in Europe at 85 euros (Rs. 5,000 approx) before taxes and subsidies, our guess is that this should hit Indian stores in a few months at about Rs. 6,000-7,000. At that price, this phone would be one of the best deals on the market and promises to be as popular as the 3310 was back in the day.

Ovi Music Unlimited

Along with a music phone, it's important to have music on your phone! Nokia has you covered on this front as well, with the launch of the new Ovi Music Unlimited service.

Basically, whenever you buy a new Nokia X-series or 5-series phone, you will have get 12 months of unlimited free music downloads from the Ovi Music catalogue. Existing users are out of luck, though, as Nokia won't be allowing any access to them. In fact, the Economic Times is saying that analysts think the company will have a difficult time coming up with a revenue model to access the service after the initial 12 months are done. Over four million tracks are on offer in India’s Ovi Music store with the vast majority made up of local language tracks. The catalogue is the biggest of its kind in India and includes regional languages such as Malayalam, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil and Marathi. Read on after the jump for the full lowdown. Music is broken into 19 genres mixing the usual Rock, Rap and Hip Hop with the local Bollywood, Sufi and Indipop.

One of the things to note is that Nokia says an Ovi Music user can easily share a song with another Ovi Music user via Bluetooth. This would probably mean that all the songs do come with some DRM.

The official page for Nokia Ovi Music Unlimited service has all the further answers you would need.