I went to the Australian Nokia Music Store launch last night at the Oxford Art Factory. Great venue, made more appealing by the fact that it’s walking distance from my place and there was free booze and nibblies.

Oddly, there were hardly any other tech journos there. I spotted two that I didn’t know well enough to attempt small talk with, so I secreted myself into one of the stairwells and played with my non-Nokia iPhone. My state of friendlessness would’ve had me leaving immediately after the presentation and a couple of beers if not for the promise of The Presets performing, one of my favourite electro brands.

I left the event with a nice little goody bag from Nokia containing a set of portable mobile phone speakers and a $10 voucher for the Music Store. As a bit of background, the Australian Nokia Music Store launched yesterday with 2.5 million tracks in its catalogue. Individual tracks are $1.70 each, albums start at $17, and you can stream unlimited tracks from your PC for $10 a month.

I decided to give the unlimited streaming thing a go on my Asus Eee PC (which is still running the default Xandros Linux OS), and was greeted by this window.

Turns out the Nokia Music Store only runs on IE6 or upwards from Windows XP or Vista. As my mate Nic from Gadget Zone says, if you’re trying to crack into an iTunes-dominated digital music market, why would you purposely limit its compatibility this way? I have a multi-platform household, with Linux, Mac and Windows, the latter of which I try to use as little as possible. No, I’m not going to fire up Vista on my MacBook just to stream music.

But that still left me with a $10 voucher that, unfortunately, isn’t printed on a paper towel so I can’t even use it to mop up coffee spills. Another way to access the Nokia Music Store is through particular Nokia mobiles, including the Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N81 8GB and Nokia N82. And whaddya know, I’ve got a Nokia N95 8GB right here. This capability makes those phones the most “connected” digital music players on the market (in Australia, anyway), as you can buy and download tracks over a cellular data connection or Wi-Fi.

Just for laughs, I tried accessing the music.nokia.com.au URL on my iPhone and got a ‘Safari can’t open the page because it can’t find the server’ error.

After signing up for an account through the N95’s web browser and redeeming my voucher (both done in under a minute), I was up and running. The music store is optimised for mobile phone navigation, with everything presented in a single column. Tracks are easy to find using the artist name and song title search fields, and you can browse through music using categories. Like iTunes, it offers a free track per week, and the main page lists the top three new releases, tracks and albums. At the bottom of the screen are text links for charts and playlists.

Other cool features are 30-second track samples and track recommendations. I used the track samples feature to find a particular Presets song in their new album that I’ve heard them play last two times I’ve seen them perform, and found it fairly easily (it’s This Boys in Love in case you were wondering – great song!), but it launches Real Player to play the clips rather than opening them from within the browser.

Even more annoying is how many times you have to click to actually download the song. I counted six screens you have to go through from the first time you press the download button to when the song actually starts downloading – a combination of The Nokia Music Store wanting to be absolutely positively completely sure you want to download the track and browser prompts telling you that you’re entering and leaving secure connections. You can cut this down to four steps if you turn off the security warnings in the browser settings.

By comparison, on the iPhone, you only have to tap once to download a song. After tapping the ‘Buy now’ button, it starts downloading immediately. That’s the way it should be on a mobile phone. People buying music on their mobile phone are busy people, after all.

One thing the Nokia Music Store offers over iTunes is the ability to redownload music that you’ve purchased. On iTunes, you’re expected to back up your purchases manually in case you delete them or lose your iPod.

The $64,000 question: would I use the Nokia Music Store to buy music on the go? If I used the Nokia N95 8GB as my main mobile phone and music player (which I don’t), then yes, I would. I’m one of those rare breed of people that actually prefers to buy music from a legitimate source because it’s convenient and the quality is guaranteed, plus I don’t have to fuss around with finding album art and fixing ID3 tags.