Sprint Unveils New Music Phone
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Richard Baguley Published on March 26, 2007 Comment on this |
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CTIA, Orlando, March 26th 2007 – Sprint unveiled their latest weapon in the war of the music cell phones: the UpStage. A rebadged Samsung M620, the $149 (with a two-year service agreement) UpStage is a flip phone in the truest sense of the word: on one side it looks like a normal phone (with a 1.4-inch LCD screen), but on the other side is a large 2.1-inch LCD screen and dedicated music controls. The music is stored on a MicroSD card that fits into the phone. Oddly, Sprint seems to have tried to keep the cost down here: a 64MB card is the only one that is included.
On the software side, Sprint is aiming to make the process of uploading music to the phone easier: they claim their Sprint Music Manager software will make for easy uploading and managing of the songs on the phone; they refer to the transfer process as “sideload”. It will also allow for music to be purchased through Sprint’s online music service, which offers 1.4 million songs for download, which Sprint clams was the first service in the US to support downloading music directly to the phone. They also announced that songs will be available for direct download for just 99 cents. It won’t however, support any copy protected music, so it won’t work with music purchased from online music stores like iTunes or Napster.
Another interesting feature is Bluetooth caller ID: if you are listening to music on a Bluetooh headset, the phone will announce the name of the caller over the music, so the user can choose to answer or ignore a call without looking at the phone itself. Sprint also claims that the UpStage will have a battery life of 6.3 hours talk time, or 16 hours when playing music, thanks to a battery wallet (the standard battery has a claimed talk time of 2.5 hours).
On the software side, Sprint is aiming to make the process of uploading music to the phone easier: they claim their Sprint Music Manager software will make for easy uploading and managing of the songs on the phone; they refer to the transfer process as “sideload”. It will also allow for music to be purchased through Sprint’s online music service, which offers 1.4 million songs for download, which Sprint clams was the first service in the US to support downloading music directly to the phone. They also announced that songs will be available for direct download for just 99 cents. It won’t however, support any copy protected music, so it won’t work with music purchased from online music stores like iTunes or Napster.
Another interesting feature is Bluetooth caller ID: if you are listening to music on a Bluetooh headset, the phone will announce the name of the caller over the music, so the user can choose to answer or ignore a call without looking at the phone itself. Sprint also claims that the UpStage will have a battery life of 6.3 hours talk time, or 16 hours when playing music, thanks to a battery wallet (the standard battery has a claimed talk time of 2.5 hours).
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