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Music mobile phone buyers guide

When you want to do away with your MP3 player, you need a mobile phone that takes music seriously. Nathan Taylor examines five that fit the bill.

It's distinctly possible that the days of the discrete MP3 player are numbered. More and more phones are hitting the market that can do everything an iPod, Zen or Sansa media player can do. Mobile phones that can sort your music, support playlists, connect to your TV set and stereo, display visualisations, even play movies and TV shows downloaded from the Internet. Really, why have two devices when you can have just one that does everything?

Of course, there are phones that support MP3 playback. And then there are music phones. MP3 playback is a standard feature on most new phones. You'd be hard pressed to find a phone currently on the market that doesn't support MP3 playback in one form or another. But there's a big difference between a phone that can just play music and a phone that's specifically designed to do so.

The capacity to manage music, to sort tracks by artist or genre (or even mood), to control playback with dedicated buttons, to listen to FM radio instead, to deliver vibrant sounds to quality headphones. These are the things that separate a music phone from a normal phone that happens to do music.

The capacity to store tracks on the phone itself is also a key feature of music phones. Most solve this using flash memory cards such as microSD cards, which have come so far down in price that you can feasibly carry half a dozen of them around with your entire music collection on them. Some also have significant amounts of internal memory, up to 16GB on high-end models, though we have seen none yet with an internal hard disk like you find in the iPod Classic.

Prices for music phones vary considerably, and in large part it will depend heavily on whether the phone supports 3G or not. Memory capacity, camera resolution, processing power, headphone quality, integrated applications and other features will also influence the price to a greater or lesser degree. Ultimately, you'll want a phone/MP3 player combo that allows you to do everything you'd want without making sacrifices on either the phone or MP3 side.

Nokia's new music store

Not content to let Apple have all the fun, in April this year Nokia decided to open its own online music outlet to rival the iTunes store. With prices a little lower than iTunes and an option to pay $10 a month for as much music as you can listen to, the music store is an interesting alternative to iTunes. Tracks at the Nokia music store are typically $1.70 and albums $17 to buy, and you can download them directly to your phone.

The subscription service is a streaming service - that is, music is streamed on demand to you phone or PC, rather than downloaded and stored (this is so you can't just subscribe for a month, download everything they have then quit). Of course, if you're using 3G data, this can seriously cut into your monthly download quotas- be careful of excessive charges. Also, because the Nokia store uses Windows Media DRM, you can only play music on devices that support that format. That doesn't include the iPod.

If you want to check it out for yourself, the store can be found online at music.nokia.com.au.

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• Music mobile phone buyers guide
• Reviews, editor's pick and what to look for in a music phone