The phone has a tiny LCD on one side (for making calls) and a bigger screen on its backside to show music info. Other features include Bluetooth 2.0 and access to Sprint's music store. The phone is out today on Sprint.

UPSTAGETM BY SAMSUNG, EXCLUSIVELY FROM SPRINT,
NOW AVAILABLE WITH FASHIONABLE RED COLOR OPTION

Attractive and innovative dual-sided music phone
follows up its award-winning debut with a new, vibrant look

UpStage by Samsung brings customers quick and easy access to
Sprint's advanced music capabilities, including over-the-air song downloads

OVERLAND PARK, Kan., and DALLAS - June 13, 2007 - Starting Monday, customers will have
a new choice to make when they purchase UpStage by Samsung as Sprint (NYSE: S) and Samsung
Telecommunications America (Samsung) debut a vibrant red color option. UpStage by Samsung is
the first dual-sided wireless phone in the U.S. designed to optimize music
capabilities with the look of an MP3 player on one side and a phone on the other.

Since its debut in late March, UpStage by Samsung sales have exceeded
expectations. In addition, UpStage has won the following industry awards:
• Best Cellphone in CNET's Cream of the Crop awards during CTIA 2007
• Best Multimedia Phone in LAPTOP's "Best of CTIA 2007" Awards
• Gadget of the Week from Popular Mechanics
• Coolest New Product at CTIA from Network World
• Mobiledia.com Editor's Choice Award

"Within its first few weeks of availability, UpStage became Sprint's best-selling
music phone and our leading Power Vision device. We are thrilled with the
overwhelming response to this innovative music phone," said Oliver Valente, senior
vice president for Product Management and Development for Sprint. "Our customers
appreciate that UpStage makes the mobile music experience fully wireless without
the need for cables or wires to download songs or listen to music on your phone."

Operating on the Sprint Mobile Broadband network, UpStage by Samsung provides
easy access to Sprint's exclusive multimedia content, including Sprint Music Store.
Sprint Music Store provides customers with quick over-the-air music downloads of
full-length songs for just 99 cents.

UpStage by Samsung is the first Sprint phone to offer the following features
designed to make mobile music more entertaining than ever:
• Sprint Music Manager, powered by Smith Micro, gives users the power to
quickly and simply transfer, or "sideload," unprotected songs from a PC to
the handset via a USB cable. Provided on an enclosed CD-ROM, Music Manager also allows
songs to be managed on the PC through an intuitive interface.


• Advanced Stereo Bluetooth 2.0 with Bluetooth caller ID enables the user to identify callers
with a spoken voice while they listen to music.
• UpStage by Samsung gives users the power to multitask with the ability to play music in
background mode while also using the phone for text messaging, playing games or surfing
the Internet.

"Samsung is excited to give our loyal customers a new look to this revolutionary union of voice,
form and music." said Peter Skarzynski, senior vice president of Strategy at Samsung
Telecommunications America. "The red UpStage offers a bright display of color on the outside
combined with high-profile music access, messaging and multitasking capabilities on the inside."

Additional features available on UpStage by Samsung include a 1.3MP camera and camcorder,
MicroSD card slot that can support up to 2GB of external memory, an easy-to-access keyguard
switch to prevent accidental dialing, and Wireless Backup to quickly restore contact information if
your phone is lost or stolen.

An extended battery wallet is included with the phone to increase talk time up to approximately 6.3
hours or 16 hours of music listening. Dual battery gauges show remaining battery life in the
extended battery wallet and the internal battery. The phone also comes packaged with a 64MB
MicroSD memory card, USB cable, 3.5mm adapter with microphone for standard music headphones
and accessories, the Sprint Music Manager application on CD-ROM and a Quick Tips guide.

UpStage by Samsung measures 4.07" x 1.73" x 0.37" and weighs just 2.57 ounces. UpStage by
Samsung is currently priced at $99 with a two-year service agreement and $50 service credit. The
red color option joins black in Sprint retail stores, www.sprint.com and 1-800-SPRINT1 on June 18.

About Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services
bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is
widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including two
robust wireless networks serving more than 53.6 million customers at the end of the first quarter
2007; industry-leading mobile data services; instant national and international walkie-talkie
capabilities; and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. For more information, visit www.sprint.com.

About Samsung Telecommunications America
Samsung Telecommunications America, LLC, a Dallas-based subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co.,
Ltd., researches, develops and markets wireless handsets and telecommunications products
throughout North America. For more information, please visit www.samsungwireless.com.

About Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media
and digital convergence technologies with 2006 parent company sales of US$63.4 billion and net
income of US$8.5 billion. Employing approximately 138,000 people in 124 offices in 56 countries,
the company consists of five main business units: Digital Media Business, LCD Business,
Semiconductor Business, Telecommunication Network Business and Digital Appliance Business.
Recognized as one of the fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer
of digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs. For more information, please visit
www.samsung.com.

###

There's not much changed other than the color, and the price is the same $99, so if you want an Aunt Flo phone, this is it.

– Jason Chen

Thanks tipster!

Sure, lately most people including Giz have made Pandora out to be just a victim of the dreaded Copyright Royalty Board. But clearly the Pandora's people have been doing more than just calling congressmen and woeing their own demise. Here's the whole basket of new Pandora goodies:

• Starting now, five Sprint phones will be Pandora ready, and by the end of June, Pandora says that all Power Vision phones will be good to go. If you have a Pandora.com account, you will get "seamless integration" into your phone. Besides, you will be able to create and fine-tune stations using just the phone. After a 30-day free trial, the ad-free Sprint Pandora service will cost $2.99 per month. Keep in mind, there'd be a Sprint data-service requirement of at least $15 per month on top of that, and there's no word of how good the streaming quality is, but if you already pay for Power Vision, it's probably worth a try. Below are shots of Pandora on the defunct Samsung A900; our opening shot is of the Pandora interface on the new music phone, the UpStage.

• Sonos 2.2 software release, free to all Sonos owners and immediately available, will include a 30-day free trial of Pandora, with a given station streaming simultaneously and in perfect sync to all of your rooms, or up to 32 different Pandora stations streamed to 32 different receivers at the same time. Like the Rhapsody service offered for Sonos, the 30-day trial doesn't require a credit card; unlike Rhapsody, Pandora will cost only $36 for a full-year subscription. (You can't do as much, of course, and some people will probably want both, but it's an interesting option.)

• New Web interface, totally redesigned for "better integration of content and community." Rather than describe it, I'll just toss it in here:

• The final point of Pandora's presentation involves future applications. Wi-Fi-connected players are an obvious point. No, there is no Zune creeping into the picture (yet), but there might be a different Connect-ion: the presentation says that Pandora is showing off a Zing-enabled device. Well, the Sansa Connect is the only one of those we can think of off-hand so, like, sweet! – Wilson Rothman

Product Page [Pandora]

But for fans of mobile music on their phones, this now cheap Upstage coupled with Sprint's 99 cent tracks may mean an even more attractive alternative to iPod + iTunes. – Jason Chen

Sprint Nextel's Upstage Goes down to $100 [rcrnews]

You can't use the tracks as a ringtones, however, even on the UpStage, a music phone, which is patently ridiculous. Still, it's a great move nonetheless, and could actually get people to use their phones as music devices—the whole disruptive potential is in grabbing tracks whenever, wherever, but before it was prohibitively expensive. Now that the price is reasonable people might finally take advantage.

Sprint's also rolling out two new music-oriented unlimited data plans in April: Power Vision Access and Power Vision Music. Bullet points after the jump.

Power Vision Access ($15 a month):

* 10 commercial-free radio channels from Sprint Radio, powered by mSpot
* exclusive video programming from Sprint Power View, including a weekly top-song countdown, breaking music news, tour information and artist interviews and performances and
* songs at $ 0.99 each from the Sprint Music Store.

* another 40 channels of commercial-free radio channels from Sprint Radio (for a total of 50),
* a channel from Sprint TV that features music videos, powered by MobiTV, including hip-hop, rock and alternative as well as flashbacks from the 80s and 90s and
* songs at $ 0.99 each from the Sprint Music Store.

Press Release [Sprint]

So for this week's Frankenreview, I've "borrowed" reviews from CNET, PCMag, PCWorld (technically a hands-on), and Mobile Review to find out if for the first time in the history of human existence, Sprint landed an awesome phone before the other carriers.

Displays
"The 65,000-color TFT display on the phone side also was a mixed bag. First off, it's tiny at just 1.4 inches diagonally (176x65 pixels). Normally we'd be up in arms about such a small screen, but we understand Samsung's motive—a bigger screen would have made for a bigger phone. It manages to cram in the date, the time, signal strength, battery life, and even photo caller ID, but the tiny dialing and message text may be too small for some users. (1)




The majority of [player side's] real estate is taken up by the large, 2.1-inch (176x220 pixels) TFT display. With support for 262,000 colors, it's bright, vivid, and easy on the eyes. It's perfect for browsing through the complete set of user-friendly menus and for taking photos (1)

Flip Sides
...this split-personality approach gets big points for innovation. It's also quite the looker and should evoke oohs and aahs from even the most jaded gadget enthusiasts. (1)

...every time you encounter something where you need to enter a letter or a number, you have to flip the phone over, enter the data on the keypad, and flip it back.... For instance, to enter a username and password on a Web form, here's what you do: Navigate to the entry box. Flip. Type in your username. Flip. Navigate. Flip. Type in your password. Flip. Navigate. (Are you getting dizzy yet?) (2)

I was a little confused the first time I encountered a text-input box on the music side, since no alphanumeric keys and no software keyboard appeared. But the device is smart enough to recognize the need to use the phone side, and I noticed that "Flip" had appeared on screen as a soft-key option.... When I used it and began entering text from the phone keypad (T9 text input mode is a welcome option here), "Save/Flip" also appeared as a soft-key option to return me seamlessly to the multimedia side. (4)

Controls
The four-way capacitive touchpad on the music side has a central, mechanical play button that took some getting used to. The excellent ...warns against trying to swipe it in a circle the way you would an iPod's control wheel, but the temptation is hard to resist. (4)

Compared with the iPod, the UpStage makes very poor use of the touchpad to move through long lists. A "sweep" of your finger down the whole touchpad skips only two options on a list. Holding your finger down at the end of the sweep steps through the list very slowly. Compared with, say, a quick twirl of the iPod click wheel, this makes moving to the end of 300 songs an ordeal. (2)

Music
In syncing mode, you can transfer music from a PC to a Micro-SD card.... Before syncing, however, you must install and run the included Sprint Music Manager desktop application and connect the phone to your PC using the included USB cable.... you simply drag and drop tunes (or albums) from the desktop app's left-hand pane to a lower-right pane.... You can create playlists on the phone itself. (4)

Sound quality through wired headphones...is very good. And the included adapter means that you can use standard music-player headphones. The built-in mono speaker is loud but tinny when playing music, and podcasts over the speaker are inaudible. (2)

Battery
...they left out a detachable battery—this thing is now literally built in the casing, not enabling the user to replace it on his/her own. (3)

We should note that this handset lasts for one day at 2-3 hours of music playback and radio, up to 1 hour of calls and few SMS. Should you be calling up the phone and music modes back and forth too often, the battery won't be happy with that either. Power users are likely to end up with less than one day of life time on their hands, while the rest of the audience should be aiming at one day of operation only. (3)

Another of the UpStage's innovative features: A stylish flip case with an embedded battery (Samsung calls the case a wallet).... The phone slides into the wallet and fits into a rigid cradle at the hinge. The included charging cable charges both the phone's battery and the wallet's battery. When stored in the wallet, the phone recharges itself from the wallet's battery. Sprint and Samsung's fact sheet says the phone's battery will support 2.5 hours of continuous talk time, which rises to 6.3 hours with the help of the battery wallet. (4)"

We didn't do a graph this week since only 2/4 of the reviews scored numerically (CNET 80, PCMag 60). But it sounds like if you aren't restricted to a DRM playlist and you can tolerate potentially excessive flipping, the UpStage is a decent music phone at a very reasonable $149 w/contract. – Mark Wilson

• It's cheap: Only $149 with contract. That's way low for a music phone with this kind of featureset.

• Unfortunately, the Upstage won't play any other form of DRM (the songs from Sprint aren't DRMEd, actually, which is nice). So your iTunes, Zune, Napster, and other form of DRMed music won't be able to be played on this.

• It comes with 64MB built-in memory, but will accept 1 and 2GB flash cards.

Jump for some more bullets, and a shocker!

• The Upstage will not be able to use music you've downloaded from their 1.4 million track repository for MP3 ringtones. In fact, from what Sprint said, you can't use MP3 ringtones at all. Ouch. We blame the RIAA for this inability to use music as a ringtone in a music phone.

• You can download tracks both over the air (OTA) or on your PC, and the service will remember which tracks you've downloaded.

• The OTA versions are more compressed than the ones from the PC—which has standard MP3 compression—so if you wanted to, you could download a higher quality version of the song later for free (see above bullet).

• You can use the phone in USB Disk mode along with their own proprietary music manager service.

• Head to sprint.com/upstage to sign up for their 4/1 launch.

And finally, when we asked Sprint how this compares to the upcoming iPhone (since they are both music-centric phones), Sprint gave us four ways in which they're different. Here they are, in bullet point form.

• It's much cheaper. $149 vs. $499

• It's smaller.

• It has OTA music downloads.

• The touchscreen feature on the iPhone will be hard to use for the majority of users.

– Jason Chen

Upstage [Sprint]

Flipping from the 9-key to the directional pad to control things can be a bit annoying. Really, that's a price worth paying on a rather interesting phone closer in size to an iPod nano than a BlackBerry Pearl (See the gallery's sizemodo photo.)

I'd consider it as a full time handset.

Not everyone feels this way, though— Sasha over at PC Mag got a nice prebrief on the handset, and rates it a 3/5. One of his complaints was the touchpad's inability to scroll as many rows as he'd want, per flick. I'd agree, but that isn't a deal breaker. –Brian Lam

*Video's music courtesy of New London Fire, which my little brother plays guitar in. Great thanks to Vincent over at Slashgear who lent us his Upstage for the gallery.
Upstage[Gizmodo]

Since it's on Sprint, you'll be able to grab Sprint's entire catalog of 1.4 million songs and "sideload" it onto the phone. Each song will be available for direct download for 99 cents, but the phone itself doesn't support Napster or iTunes or any other DRM scheme.

One cool feature about this that we haven't talked about before is the caller ID announcement through the headphones if you're currently listening to music. Let's see the iPhone do that. – Jason Chen

Sprint Unveils New Music Phone [WirelessInfo]

Flash demo [via Engadget]

Also, his stage presence has improved dramatically, no small thanks to a little intro with Mossberg's image, name, jingle, and improved lighting. This is a brave new world, and Mossberg is diving in: Godfather says, all your base are below to us, gadget video bloggers. I won't lie, it's not entertaining like Pogue's work. But the added polish pushes the main Mossberg "thang" across: Blistering Authority that makes the gadget makers feel like the Mossy Professor is taking them to G-school.

The phone is doomed from paragraph 2, but basically the meat is this: He hates the 2.5 hours of talk time and 7 hours of music playback, as well as the trouble with flipping between front and back. The phone's UI is two faced, like the LCD setup. It promises that two sets of controls will make for dedicated music and phone controls, but in the end, it just feels like you've two sets of controls to contend for your attention.

Comparing it to an LG phone, it fares well. But what doesn't? (Like saying your mother in law is far more beautiful than swine, this is really an insult formed as a compliment.) And compared to the iPod Nano, the Samsung phone eats shit. I find these comparisons to be a bit confusing when a Sony Ericsson W810 from Cingular or a Sprint Fusic might have been better matches.

I think this phone's sophisticated design is meant for a technophile, not your typical WSJ reader. But as written to his audience, his arguments are bulletproof, the Upstage has no escape, and I barely have any writing material.

I suppose he's flexing his mental facilities after some people called his Apple TV review a soft verdict. (I didn't think so — the scoop called for a classic review, straight up, and that's what he delivered.)

Samsung and Sprint deserve credit for a good try with the UpStage. But it doesn't quite cut it.

–Brian Lam

Latest Music Phone Is a Creative Gadget Marred by Big Flaws [PTech/WSJ]