Muve Music Service (Cricket Wireless)

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Muve Music

In late 2010, Cricket Wireless came to CNET's San Francisco headquarters to show us the Samsung Suede, a cell phone it intended to launch at CES. While the touch-screen handset itself is fairly standard, it earns the distinction of being the first to house Muve Music (pronounced "move"), an innovative music-centered pricing plan that promises unlimited music downloads, ringtones, and ringback tones along with talk, text, and data.

We were so impressed by the concept, we nominated Muve Music for a Best of CES award. However, Muve had a hard time getting off the ground, at least from our point of view. Cricket delayed the phone's launch when it discovered a glitch in the software, and even after that was fixed, CNET still had to wait a couple months for a review unit until Muve would work outside of Cricket's coverage areas (San Francisco uses Cricket's roaming network). The service doesn't quite live up to expectations, but with some work, Cricket Wireless can still move fast enough to patch up the holes.

The service
There are plenty of ways to describe Muve Music, but we think the best is as a music rental program. We say "rental" because the music comes from one source (it's approved by the major U.S. labels), it isn't transferable onto a computer or any other device, and you lose access if you stop paying your monthly bill. At no point do you ever truly "own" the songs.

Muve Music is a clever way to fold a music subscription into a monthly plan.

When you enter Muve by pressing a button on the Suede (it's embossed with a music note), you're greeted by five application icons on a black backdrop. There's the My Music library of tunes, the Get Music download store, and the My DJ app, which aggregates genre-based playlists that you can download to the phone. There's also a version of Shazam's music identifier that's tailored for Muve, and the Get Social app for interacting with other users based on your musical preferences. On a smaller navigation strip, you'll see an inbox for "shouts" (messages broadcast by other Muve Music users), and Help and Settings options (the settings control your Muve Music profile picture and sync settings).

Moving around in the music portion of the OS is mostly straightforward, but there are rough edges. Not every arrow or button is clearly labeled, which leads to some trial and error. To exit the music mode, for example, you press the End button, and not the music key that you press to get in. You can press the music button to jump to the currently playing song from wherever you are, but we'd also like to see a Now Playing ticker in the software.

It takes too many clicks to get into a playlist, and it's difficult to edit or add to the playlist on the fly without interrupting the playback. It's almost too easy to delete songs from Muve as a whole, and you can also erase entire playlists without the phone asking for confirmation. Strangely, though, deleting individual tracks from a playlist is much more difficult.