It was only a matter of time...but wait what's that, a Memory card added! Brilliant!
At Last, Phone Some Tunes to Yourself November 10, 2005
David Pogue
YOU just know that certain technologies, once they become inexpensive and easy to use, will be earth-shattering hits: instant viewing of any movie ever made; nonpolluting cars; cellphones that don't drop calls.
Don't look now, but one longstanding member of the Someday Club has just become a reality, more or less: anytime, anywhere wireless downloading of favorite songs for instantaneous listening - no computer necessary.
This remarkable service is brought to you by Sprint.
It's the first cellular carrier to unveil a phone-based online music store; the others have similar plans. Their logic goes like this: "Those crazy kids have bought 30 million iPods and a billion songs from online music stores. They also spend nearly $5 billion a year on downloadable ring tones. What if we could combine those two trends? If teenagers could download full-length songs right onto their cellphones - we'll be rich, I tell you! Rich!"
Well, maybe. As usual, the devil is in the details.
From a design standpoint, at least, Sprint got most of them right. When you click the Music icon on your phone, you wait about six seconds before arriving at a teeny tiny text-only online music store.
Navigation is quick and satisfying. With a couple of simple button presses, you can search by song title or band name, using the number keys to enter text. You can also browse categories like New This Week and What's Hot, or by musical genre. (This part needs work; in Sprint's wacky world of musical genres, Tom Jones, Bob Dylan and David Bowie are considered "Classical.")
The catalog offers 250,000 songs, about an eighth of what's on the iTunes Music Store. The marquee bands from the four big record companies are here, but you won't find many classical performers or independent labels. Sprint says the catalog will improve.
You can listen to a free 30-second preview, or click Buy to grab the complete track. A typical pop song arrives in about 35 seconds, ready for playback or adding to a playlist that you've created on the phone.
All of this fun requires one of two special Sprint phones: the Sanyo MM-9000 ($230) or the Samsung SPH-A940 ($250); the prices reflect a rebate and a two-year service commitment. These are impressive phones.
The Samsung, for example, takes two-megapixel photos and has an actual 2X optical zoom lens, which, as far as Sprint and I know, is a first for a phone in the United States.
FOR music fans, though, two other features are far more significant. First, both phones can subscribe to Sprint's Power Vision service: an Internet connection, known to geeks as EV-DO, that puts your cellphone online with the speed of a slowish cable modem.
Power Vision starts at $15 a month (on top of your voice plan) and includes unlimited text messaging, picture sending, Web surfing, Sirius radio listening and live, if choppy, TV viewing. This service, and therefore Sprint's new music store, is available in the 75 cities identified at
www.sprint.com/wirelesshighspeeddata. The second critical phone feature is a removable memory card. The included starter card holds only 15 or 25 songs. A larger replacement - say, a 512-megabyte card, which holds about 500 songs - costs $70 for the Samsung (TransFlash format) or $60 for the Sanyo (MiniSD). If you like, you can copy songs from other sources to these cards from your PC (in MP3 or unprotected AAC format) and play those on your phone, too.
After buying the expensive phone, the expensive Internet service and the expensive memory card, there's one more surprise: the expensive songs. You get five freebies for starters. After that, Sprint music store songs cost $2.50 apiece, plus tax.
What are they, nuts?
Unless they've just spent four years in a sensory-deprivation tank, surely Sprint's executives know that the iTunes Music Store and its rivals have solidly established the sweet spot of customer acceptance at $1 a song. What makes Sprint think it can charge two and a half times as much and still make people happy?
"It's a new market, the first service of its kind, serving a different type of customer," Jackie Bostick, a Sprint spokeswoman, said. "We are not necessarily going after people who are downloading tons of music online." (Translation: "Please don't bring up the iTunes thing.")
Online, the overwhelming reaction to Sprint's pricing is disgust and sarcasm. But at least one customer at Engadget.com sees Sprint's logic: "It's the same reason I pay $8 for a hot dog at a baseball game. I could have the same dog at home for 23 cents, but I pay the premium because it gives me the hot dog where I am, when I want it."
You could also argue that $2.50 a song is actually a bargain compared with the price of ring tones. As incredible as it strikes rational adults, teenagers worldwide line up to pay $2.50 apiece just for 20-second snippets of pop songs to use as ringer sounds. Now they can get the whole song for that price.
There's another mitigating factor, too. Songs you download directly to the phone stay on the phone (or another Sprint phone, if you upgrade later). But the price also includes a second copy of each song, which you can download directly to a Windows XP computer.
After an annoying "licensing check," these copies behave like songs from Napster.com or another non-iTunes store. You can burn them freely to CD, play them on one or two other computers and transfer them to a pocket player. (But not an iPod; these songs play only those bearing Microsoft's Plays For Sure logo.)
The PC copy arrives in a far higher-fidelity format (WMA, 128 kilobits per second) than the songs you get on your phone, which have been heavily compressed to conserve memory-card space. (To be precise, the phone songs are in AAC+ format, at a toe-curlingly low 32 kilobits per second.)
A typical phone-based song occupies one megabyte. That's about one-fourth the size of a song from the iTunes Music Store, and you know what that means: less musical data = lower sound quality. The phones' built-in speakers or stereo earbuds sound fine when you're riding the subway or strolling past jackhammers. But you wouldn't want to listen to "The Nutcracker" Suite in your wood-paneled library this way.
The phone's battery is good for about seven hours of music playback using the earbuds, assuming you make no phone calls. You can sort your songs by band or genre, but not, weirdly enough, by song name. Incoming phone calls can automatically pause the music, which is a nice touch. But the music also stops, annoyingly, whenever you leave the Now Playing screen for any reason.
As a final shock, you can't use your downloaded songs as ring tones. If you love a certain Beyoncé track, you'll have to pay $2.50 for the ring tone, and another $2.50 for the whole song. The average music fan is to be forgiven for concluding that the whole enterprise reeks of greed.
Now, there are plenty of other ways to get music onto a cellphone. Motorola's Rokr phone plays songs from the iTunes Music Store and smart phones like the Treo accept memory cards filled with music and so on. But these phones still require an appointment with your computer.
Sprint's music store, on the other hand, is wireless, mobile and instantaneous. It should have been a thrilling test of the belief that the next iPod will be the humble cellphone.
But Sprint's pricing is so high, its catalog so small and its ring-tone restriction so silly, it turns out not to be a good test case at all. These clueless corporate decisions will keep customers away in droves, leaving unanswered the question of how popular a reasonably priced cellphone music store might become.
The service works as advertised, and avoids design complexity. But unless Sprint's policy makers change their tune - and tunes - the music-cellphone market remains somebody else's for the conquering.
E-mail:
Pogue@nytimes.com
