• Courier-Mail, Cnet, Financial Times, Forbes, PC World , Friday, October 3, 2008 11 AM

There are 590 news articles listed in Google News this morning about the unveiling of the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music Thursday -- and that's just in English. The touch-screen handset is compatible with Nokia's Comes With Music program, so customers will be able to download music from the catalogs of Warner, Sony, Universal and EMI. It has 8 gigabytes of memory and is equipped with maps and satellite navigation, and will cost the equivalent of nearly $400 when it goes on sale in Great Britain Oct. 16.

Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson, writing in Australia's Courier-Mail newspaper, calls the phone a "potential iPhone assassin." Cnet's Crave blog points out, however, that although analysts across the board are making the obvious iPhone comparisons, Nokia is quick to dismiss them. It has a slide show of screen shots of the device here .

Nokia is hailing its new music download service as a "game changer," the Financial Times says in both its headline and lede .  But 5800 itself won't be -- at least not in the short term, says Forbes , quoting Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. "The 5800 is not going to be a game-changer for Nokia this year due to the limited availability and the fact that the 'Comes With Music' option is not going to be available in most of the countries it will be shipping," she says.

It will only be released in Asia, the Middle East, Russia and Spain before the end of 2008. The rest of Europe gets it in the first quarter of 2009, and the U.S. sometime before the middle of next year.

Fact is, while Nokia is the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, it has done notoriously poorly in the U.S. That doesn't mean that Nokia doesn't have its eyes firmly fixed on North America. CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told a Silicon Valley audience this week that the U.S. will snatch the lead in mobile technology from Europe as the Internet is integrated with mobile devices, PC World reports.

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