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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...
...tested the service on Sprint's hot new MM-A940 from Samsung, and the technology worked as billed. Provided you're in one of the 75 markets nationwide where Sprint's Power Vision high-speed network is up and running, you should have no trouble downloading songs...
...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...
TECHNOLOGY BRIEFS Sprint's new music service lets users download songs to their mobile phones for $2.50 each. See Time.com for a review Microsoft's Windows Live will offer online business services starting in 2006 A new, free version of Google Local provides mapping for mobile phones Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced a new way to buy individual pages of books; see his interview at Time.com