Author: freemobilecontent.net

Description: On the surface that all sounds fine, but here's the important catch for the time being: songs purchased on the A707 will download only to the user's PC and not to the phone. To get your tracks into the phone, you'll have to transfer them with a USB cable. And while that's annoying in itself, neither a memory card nor a USB cable comes with the phone, so you must purchase them separately. We'd prefer Cingular include at least one accessory, even if they'd charge a few dollars more. Cingular says it will activate wireless music downloads in the near future, but until that time, it's a rather circuitous process to get tracks into your phone.

On the upside, Cingular Music's pricing scheme appears to be quite reasonable. If using Napster, subscribers pay the normal Napster-to-Go subscription fee of $14.95 per month. For phone purchases, a new service called Napster Mobile enables users to preview and buy songs from the phone for just $0.99, far cheaper than Sprint's maximum fee of $2.50 per track and Verizon's charge of $1.99. A Yahoo Music subscription costs $11.99 per month with no additional fees and eMusic offers specialized content for Cingular's Sony Ericsson Walkman phones, including the W810i or the W300i. For even more music fun, Cingular Music offers access to 25 XM Satellite radio channels for $8.99 per month, a song ID service to identify mystery tracks heard on the radio, access to Billboard Mobile for music news and show information, streaming music videos, and a community site for musical discussions via text or instant messaging.

The music-player interface is a bit generic and features a simple animated graphic with the track name, artist, and album on both the internal and external displays. We were hoping for album art as well, but it's perfectly serviceable for listening to tunes. Features were limited as well. Though you can create play lists and choose from shuffle and repeat modes, there's no equalizer. But of course, we love that the Sync supports a stereo Bluetooth profile. When playing music while the phone is closed, the external controls and display become inactive after a few seconds. Though this timing is unchangeable, a quick press of the button on the right spine will make them active again. Stay tuned for a closer investigation of Cingular Music and the A707's player. .
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