Word: downloading
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last week, Sprint launched its over-the-air music store, the first of its kind operating in the U.S. Using one of Sprint's new Power Vision phones, you type in the name of a song you want, then tap a button to download it to the phone's internal memory. The actual download is fast, generally 20 to 30 seconds (though it could take a few minutes in spotty coverage). Once the song is in your phone, you can play it whenever you like, through the phone's speaker or earbuds that come with the phone...
...Each song costs $2.50 to purchase, high compared to the 99 cents online music stores charge. But the $2.50 doesn't just pay for the track on your phone: when you purchase a track, you also get the opportunity to download it over the Web to your computer, in the form of a protected Windows Media Audio file that you can listen to with Windows Media Player. You can load the song on compatible portable players from the likes of Dell, Creative, Samsung and iRiver. (No iPods, though...
...might have trouble finding a song you want to download, however. At the moment, Sprint says it has 250,000 songs for sale. I did some random searching, and had a hard time pinpointing what, exactly, this 250,000 consisted of. Searches for Dire Straits, Jamiroquai or the Decemberists turned up nothing; searches for Rolling Stones and Spoon gave me one song each (actually, a Dr. Dre remix of a Stones song and a Spoon track from a TV show compilation). I did find more songs when I typed in 10,000 Maniacs, Steely Dan, Eminem and Wilco...
...With time, the library of available songs will grow, but there are other concerns. I could not use a downloaded track as a ringtone on the A940, even after paying about the same amount. Still worse: although Sprint says you don't have to have a data plan to buy music, the company will bill you extra for the data connection you used during downloads. At 2 cents per kilobyte, the average 1-megabyte song download could suddenly set you back an extra...
...people around the world. But maybe we haven't done a good enough job of communicating about what our products can do now. [Colligan picks up a Treo 650.] I have a 2-GB expansion card here. I can store approximately 10 movies on this. I can also download an application called MobiTV and view television on this. So it's not as Star Treky as it sounds. It's possible today...