On the phone, the Sprint Music Store interface is pretty simple. Once you open the music browser, which is a featured option in the menu, you get two tabs: Store and Player. Under Store, Sprint lists a Featured Music section with three tracks, as well as a Categories section that narrows things down with options such as New This Week and What's Hot. We gravitated toward the search function and found our desired songs and artists that way. The browser took about 9 seconds to return for results. That's not bad, but it was definitely slower than a PC music service such as Rhapsody. Download performance was also OK. Bloc Party's "Banquet," which is 3 minutes, 21 seconds long, took about 50 seconds to download to the phone.
Under the Player tab of Sprint Music Store, you'll see an All My Music option and any playlists you've made, as well as a Create Playlist option. Once on the music page, you can view tracks by song name, artist, or genre. Starting up the player takes about 4 seconds, as does switching between tracks while they're playing; the wait is more than what we're used to from a stand-alone MP3 player, but it wasn't too bad overall. At least there were no skips or pauses during playback, and you can view album art while you're listening. The best part is that you can close the phone while the music player is running and use the control pad on the front to access the basic music functions. Whether the Samsung MM-A920 was open or shut, music coming through the speakers was unspectacular--tinny overall with little bass response. Connecting a stereo headset helped considerably, but we still recommend listening to the bulk of your music on an MP3 player.
