Rich proposition: You won’t need a computer to access your favourite music

You just know that certain technologies, once they finally become inexpensive and easy to use, will be earth-shattering hits: instant viewing of any movie ever made, nonpolluting cars, cell phones that don’t drop calls.

Don’t look now, but one long-standing member of the Someday Club has just become a reality, more or less: anytime, anywhere wireless downloading of favourite 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 cell phones ? 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 just 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 a lot of work; in Sprint’s wacky world of musical genres, Tom Jones, Bob Dylan and David Bowie are considered “Classical..”) The catalogue contains 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 catalogue 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.

The Samsung, for example, takes 2-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 US.

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 cell phone 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.

What are they, nuts? Unless they have 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 150 per cent of that and still make people happy?

There’s another mitigating factor, too: Songs you download directly to the phone stay on the phone (or on 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. (NYTNS)