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Samsung & AT&T announce first Napster Mobile capable phone

Alfredo Padilla Published on November 19, 2007 Comment on this

After announcing a partnership with Napster to provide its customers with direct music downloads to their handsets AT&T is making available the first phone to take advantage of the service, the Samsung SLM. The SLM is, as its name suggests, a slim clamshell handset, similar to the Samsung Sync, also carried by AT&T. In order to facilitate direct downloads to the phone the SLM supports AT&T's high speed HSDPA network, with download speeds up to 1 megabit per second. Music can be stored on a Micro SD card and the handset also supports other AT&T services such as streaming video channels and video sharing. The SLM will be available on November 23 for $149.99 with a two-year contract.

Sales of music directly to phones is seen as a strong growth opportunity by carriers and handset makers. Until now AT&T has offered customers the opportunity to purchase music via their computer using services like Napster and then "side-load" the music onto their phones.  Getting into the direct to handset music market means AT&T can better compete with Verizon Wireless and Sprint, both of whom have offered such services for quite awhile.

One possible barrier to adoption of the service is pricing. AT&T will offer customers two different pricing models, either $1.99 per song or $7.49 a month for five songs. Either way the price per track is higher than the 99 cents per song charged by most stores when music is purchased on your PC, including Napster and iTunes. Sprint has recently dropped prices for their direct to handset sales to match this price, but Verizon still charges a rate similar to that offered by AT&T.

It remains to be seen whether the convenience of direct to handset sales will overcome higher prices. Despite a strong effort by both handset manufacturers and carriers most US consumers still haven't adopted their cell phones as their primary music device. This is in contrast to markets in Europe and Japan where music oriented handsets are much more popular.