fringsters as you may have seen in our last post, Nokia last night announced that ‘Comes with Music‘, “a pioneering digital entertainment service, is now available in South Africa. The service, offers consumers a year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalogue.

Comes With Music devices enable the consumer to download an unlimited number of the over 5-million digital tracks available on the South African Nokia Music Store http://music.nokia.co.za for a one year period. In addition, the consumer is able to keep all their downloaded music from the diverse catalogue of international and local artists - even when the service period of one year is over – on both their Comes With Music device and dedicated PC.

Comes with Music will be available exclusively across a range of Nokia devices through MTN, Cell C, Nashua Mobile and Autopage cellular. Devices include the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic Comes with Music edition – exclusive to MTN, the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic and the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic available across all four channels.”

Comes With Music is a great new service, the only question I have is when will we see Comes With Fring

If you happen to have any one of these great new Nokia handsets be sure to download fring here.

fringsters put your hands together for the one and only Nokia 5530 Xpress Music.

This sleek and sexy Nokia handset is now officially available in South Africa and we are excited to announce that fring already lets you take your friends mobile with this great new Nokia device.

Although “Nokia might have been late to the touchscreen game,” it sure is “making up for lost time now by following up the successful 5800 XpressMusic and N97 with the budget 5530 XpressMusic.”

Most of the western world is abuzz after Apple recently introduced the Apple iPhone 3Gs. Here in Africa though things are different. Most of us cannot afford the high tech gadgetry on offer from Apple. I mean lets face it, most people here in Africa are just looking for something cool yet low cost which will do the job and boy oh boy does the Nokia 5530 do just that.

Nokia last night together with the launch of the Nokia 5530 and 5630 Xpress Music also launched “Comes with music.” “The service, which offers consumers a year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalogue, is now available in South Africa. Comes With Music devices enable the consumer to download an unlimited number of the over 5-million digital tracks available on the South African Nokia Music Store http://music.nokia.co.za for a one year period. In addition, the consumer is able to keep all their downloaded music from the diverse catalogue of international and local artists - even when the service period of one year is over – on both their Comes With Music device and dedicated PC.”

This is why in my humble opinion, companies like Nokia will always have market share in Africa. They are making sure that people of all walks of life are able to groove to the beat on a sexy touch screen device. Thank you Nokia

fringsters if you happen to be one of the lucky few who already has your hands on the Nokia 5530 what are you waiting for download fring today. If you are still thinking of upgrading to a new device, think no more, head over to your nearest cellphone dealer and grab yourself one of these beauties while stocks last.

Note: I will review the Nokia 5530 more closely in the coming weeks.

During the 2nd quarter of what has probably been the worst year for global economies it is good to see that smartphones sales world wide are still booming with over 41 million handsets shipped. This is but a small number when you think that during the same time 228 million regular ‘junky’ handsets were shipped world wide.

During this quarter Apple reportedly sold 5.2 Million iPhone handsets, while Nokia reported sales of 5 million E71 and 6.8 million 5800 Xpress Music handsets, RIM sold around 8 million BlackBerries.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the fring family grows in the next few months as more and more people start to investigate the cool features of their newly aquaired smartphone handsets. We look forward to welcoming the 41 million new Smartphone users world wide to the fring family

Having just upgraded my handset to the shiny new Nokia 5800 Xpress Music aka Tube, I thought it good to do a post showing the applications I have personally found to be the most useful on my 5800.

There are currently not many applications that support this sexy handset but given some time I am sure many new apps will become available.

Please note that my list of top 10 must have apps for the 5800 includes both free and premium services.

1. fring - Lets you talk, chat and interact freely between: Skype, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Twitter, Facebook, GoogleTalk, AIM, SIP, Gmail Notifier, LastFM, Orkut and Yandex
2. JoikuSpot - Turns your mobile handset into a secure WLAN (Wi-Fi) HotSpot.
3. Gmail - Google’s free email service - this is the best email service on earth.
4. Google Maps - Possibly the best free mobile mapping software available.
5. Opera Mini - The world’s most popular mobile Web browser
6. File Zip - Easily zip and unzip files on your 5800 - Get it from the download menu on your handset.
7. Accuweather - The best weather application on the 5800. It’s also in the download menu on handset.
8. Best Screensnap - A cool application for taking screenshots. In the download menu on handset.
9. Photoflow - This is a great application for viewing images. In the download menu on handset.
10. Paint Pad - For those of us who love to draw. Available from the download menu on handset.

This is my current Top 10 and when more applications become available the list will change