Gigatec - Home

Nokia claims $1 billion Qualcomm payments

IDC releases year-end Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker report

Apple hit with yet another iPhone patent lawsuit

Apple faces new lawsuit over iPhone concept

Mobile entertainment to be driven by music, games and mobile TV

Injunction prohibits Qualcomm's infringement on Broadcom patents

Ericsson technology enables new safety device launched by NTT DoCoMo

Suit Targets Biggest Players In Cell Phone Industry

'Pay-Buy Mobile' initiative announced by GSMA

	Minerva Industries, Inc. Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Apple, Inc . and Atlantic RT, Inc.

	The USPTO officially issued and published a new patent number #7,321,783

	Patent infringement suit filed by Minerva Industries, Inc.

Forsee's Sprint Nextel Launches Music Service

Source
Chris Noon, 11.01.05, 11:18 AM ET

Polyphony? Gary D. Forsee's wireless bellwether Sprint Nextel will be hoping to take a bite out of Apple Computer with the launch of its downloadable music service Monday--the first company to deliver premier quality full track over-the-air downloads on a U.S. cellular network.

Subscribers can cherry-pick tunes from a selection of 250,000 ditties provided by EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group (nyse: WMG - news - people ) and Vivendi Universal's (nyse: V - news - people ) Universal Music Group, and download them for $2.50 a pop using Samsung Electronics or Sanyo Electric cell phones. One happy idiosyncrasy--users will receive two copies of each tune: one tweaked to play on their phone and a high-quality version that is beamed to their PC.

The first company to get tunes direct to your mobile? Didn't Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people )and Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ) suss that with the recently launched iTunes ROKR phone? Not quite--users of that service must first download tracks to a PC before transferring them to the phone. Which may make you think twice about getting an iPod, or vice-versa.

"Sprint is first carrier in the U.S. to deliver what customers want most in a wireless music store--the instant gratification of downloading and owning their own personal collection of high-quality songs on a device that is always with them," said Len Lauer, Sprint Nextel's (nyse: S - news - people ) chief operating officer.

Sprint Power Vision phones come packaged with a removable memory card that is plugged into the phone to buy, download and play full songs from the Music Store. Using a 1GB removable memory card, customers have the ability to store up to 1000 songs--that's ten times the capacity of the ROKR--purchased from the Sprint Music Store. Each download will be over before the kettle's boiled--around 30 seconds per track.

There may be some quibbles over the service's pricing, almost two-a-half-times the 99 cents that iTunes charges for a download. Yet there's a belief among mobile carriers that consumers will pay a premium to buy music while they are out and about. Yup, that's their euphemism for "instant gratification".