Nokia today stepped up its defence of the mobile market, launching a new range of handsets and an online music store in an attempt to counter the threat posed by Apple’s iPhone.

The Nokia Music Store will be accessible through a new mobile internet portal dubbed Ovi and will compete head-on with Apple’s iTunes, the dominant force in online music. Nokia's new online platform, which will also offer games and mobile mapping tools, is expected to launch in the UK in the autumn.

The new music service will sell tracks for 79p, matching the price charged by Apple, which commands as much as 80 per cent of the download market.

Users of Nokia's new service will be able to download tracks directly to certain Nokia handsets – marking an advantage over the iPhone, which can only carry tracks that have first been downloaded to a computer.

Nokia is following rival groups including Microsoft, Creative and Samsung in building its own music store after being refused access to Apple’s iTunes service. The venture also follows Nokia’s acquisition last year of Loudeye, the digital music distributor, for about $60 million.

However, analysts questioned Nokia’s prospects in the download market. Other groups have failed to tackle the twin hurdles of Apple's leading position and rampant digital music piracy, they noted.

Paul Jackson and Charles S. Golvin, analysts at Forrester Research, said: “This service isn't sufficiently differentiated to make a major impact in terms of convincing consumers to either start using legal download services or ween them off of Apple's service and dedicated music devices.”

The world’s largest mobile handset maker also revealed a range of new phones, including a music and games-orientated handset, the N81, which comes equipped with 8GB of memory, is being billed as a "multimedia computer" and will take on the much-hyped iPhone.

Apple is expected to roll out the iPhone across Europe in the coming months but faces a growing host of competitors in the smartphone market, including devices from RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry mobile e-mail service, and Far Eastern rivals such as HTC and Samsung.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia's chief executive, said the new online music store would have a catalogue of “millions” of tracks. “Our target is to have all the music in all the world available to everybody,” he said.

He added that the Nokia catalogue would match the scope of that offered by Apple.

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