Nokia 5800 Chrome on T-Mobile vs HTC Hero on 3

The mobile music gauntlet has been laid down. Last week 3 announced it would be bundling Spotify Premium accounts with the HTC Hero next month. Yesterday, T-Mobile announced that the exclusive Chrome version of Nokia’s best-selling 5800 XpressMusic phone would be launching on the 1st of November. Since these two offers are launching around the same time, we thought we’d do a quick comparison.

Nokia 5800 Chrome

Network: T-Mobile
Contract: £30 a month
Minutes: 700
Messages: Unlimited
Music: Unlimited Comes With Music for 12 months
Memory: Up to 16GB via microSD
Phone Cost: Free

The Nokia 5800 Chrome isn’t as cutting edge as the Android-powered HTC Hero, but as a music phone it’s a fairly solid offering. It comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack and moving tracks between your computer and phone is easy using Nokia’s PC suite, Windows Media Player or your preferred desktop audio player. What’s good about Comes With Music though is that you get to keep your music, on your PC and 5800, even after your contract is up. At £30 a month it’s £120 less expensive than the Hero contract and the Nokia 5800 is also free, whereas the Hero costs £99. You also get unlimited internet access with the contract, so it won’t cost you any more to download songs directly to your phone.

HTC Hero

Network: 3
Contract: £35 a month
Minutes: 750
Messages: Unlimited
Music: Unlimited Spotify Premium for 24 months
Memory: Up to 16GB via microSD
Phone Cost: £99

Overall the Hero is a better phone than the 5800 but we’re focussing on music here. The Hero has a 3.5mm headphone jack and Spotify is really easy to use. Spotify allows you to instantly listen to a track and includes the option to temporarily download songs — so you can listen to them without needing a data connection. Unlike Comes With Music, which is currently DRM protected, you can access music through Spotify on a variety of devices. The disadvantages of using Spotify is that once your subscription is up then you lose access to it on your phone — until you renew your contract or pay for a new subscription. Another issue is that streaming music over 3G or Wi-Fi will eat up your Hero’s battery life.