Like I had mentioned, Nokia India on recently conducted a music bootcamp for bloggers to give us a demo on the recently gone live, ‘Nokia Music Store – India’ and also share insight on their plans for the phased rollout of the store. If you recall, Nokia India had previously held a similar blogger meetup with Mr. Axel Meyer, when the N97 came to India and I cannot overemphasize how glad I am that Nokia India has started holding such events here in India as well.

As always, the event was very well hosted and we had some meaningful conversations over drinks and dinner. But before I give you my reactions on the store, here are a few key takes aways from the bootcamp:

• The X3 and X6 are coming to India.
• We should start seeing the first ‘Comes with Music’ devices in Q1 next year.
• The lack of credit card based purchase was a thought-out and conscious decision by Nokia India.
• No specifics, but the DRM free rollout will be in line with the rest of the world.
• Nokia will be piloting a voucher based system for purchasing tracks from the store, no word on pricing yet.
• The vouchers will be similar to the way you can now purchase N-Gage games in certain cities from Nokia Priority Dealers.
• Credit card based billing may be rolled out in the future.

The one thing that bothers me is the fact that as of now the ways to utilize this huge collection of songs is very limited. You can get a new device and download music but that will be restricted to a fixed number of tracks (e.g. 100) depending on what device you buy. The voucher system isn’t in place, credit card purchase is a no-go and comes with music isn’t coming till next year. Therefore, because of this, it will only be in a few months that we start to see the true potential of the store being realized. The silver line is the free tracks of the week section that is available to everyone.

As far as the store is concerned, the sheer diversity is quite impressive and the interface is not bad at all. Transferring music is a breeze and the PC application has greatly improved from when we first saw it and is much faster now. Infact, Nokia is even getting into agreements with a Artists/Bands to exclusive launch their music on the Nokia Music Store first.

Coming back to the fun part, Nokia had invited a band called Advaita to perform at the event and here is a snippet of their riveting performance.