BUT HOW MUCH ARE THE SERVICE PLANS?:

Apple Chomper: How Nokia can knock the iPod from its perch (Alexander Dryer, Oct. 25, 2006, Slate)

I'm bullish on Nokia's chances after spending the last week with the N91, part of the company's line of multimedia phones. Constructed of matte stainless steel with silver and black plastic highlights, the N91 looks like any other candy-bar-style handset, albeit with a bit of extra heft around the middle. The most visible difference is the group of playback controls—pause, rewind, etc.—that takes up the area beneath the screen. To make a phone call, you slide down these controls to reveal a standard keypad. The other big difference between the N91 and standard phones is on the inside, where Nokia has installed a 4-gigabyte hard drive in place of the typical low-capacity flash chip. (The N91 I tested was released in April; a new version announced last month offers an 8-gigabyte drive and various small improvements.)

Music phones (most notably, Motorola's iTunes-compatible ROKR) have gotten pretty terrible reviews. I was surprised, then, to discover how much I enjoyed the N91. All the traditional phone functions work flawlessly, and calls sound as clear as they do on my landline. There's even a bare-bones e-mail application and a surprisingly powerful browser. Most significantly, the music player integrates with all of this seamlessly. If you're listening to a song when the phone rings, it will pause until you finish your conversation, then resume automatically. The playback controls work no matter what else you're doing, so you can rewind in the middle of writing a text message. A dedicated key next to the play button also lets you flip back and forth between "phone mode" and "music-player mode." The sound wasn't perfect—I noticed some skips when selecting a new playlist or flipping through songs—but it was remarkably good.
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Transferring music from my laptop was relatively painless, too. The Nokia Music Manager installed without a hitch on my MacBook Pro and allowed me to copy my iTunes library with ease. (The N91, like all non-Apple devices, cannot play music purchased from the iTunes Store.) PC users can get even smoother integration—the N91 connects directly to Windows Media Player without the need for an external application.

The bottom line? The N91 is a good music player and a superb phone. That said, I wouldn't buy one for the outlandish current price of $599 when you can get an iPod and a phone separately for less money. However, keep in mind that today's music phones are for the early adopter crowd. Mobile-service providers are notorious for taking months to approve new phones for their networks, but once the N91 or a similar Nokia model is cleared, the Nseries won't be for early adopters anymore—it will be a legitimate competitor to the iPod. Since the service providers subsidize phone prices to win customers, the 8 GB N91 probably will cost around $200-$250, about the same as the 8-gigabyte iPod nano.