Sprint customers will be the first wireless customers in the U.S. to download full songs over-the-air. Today Sprint announced the opening of the Sprint Music Store powered by Groove Mobile, the first music store in the U.S. that lets wireless customers browse, preview, download, play and manage high-quality digital music, right from their phone. Sprint customers can now take their music with them on the go and have instant access to purchase and download music when they want to, not just when they are in front of a PC.

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Sprint Music Store customers can browse, preview and purchase hundreds of thousands of songs from virtually every genre of music from EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group. For $2.50 a song, customers get two copies of the song: one high-quality version formatted to play and enjoy only on their phone and another high-quality version formatted to download on their PC. Customers can also burn their music to a CD using Windows Media Player.

The Sprint Music Store operates on the high-speed Sprint Power Vision Network and is now available on two new multimedia phones, including the Sanyo MM-9000 and the Samsung MM-A940, also announced today. When on the Sprint Power Vision Network, customers can download a full-length song in as little as 30 seconds.

The Sprint Music Store includes both a Store and Player. The Store allows customers to browse, preview and buy digital music. The Player allows customers to view their music by genre and by artist, as well as play and manage their music using playlists. It also allows customers to bring music from their PC over to their phone. Sprint Power Vision phones come packaged with a high-quality stereo headset that enables customers to enjoy music privately. Or, if they prefer, they can play their music with the phone closed without the stereo headset.

Sprint Power Vision phones come packaged with a removable memory card that is inserted in the phone to buy, download and play full songs from the Sprint Music Store. Using an optional 1GB removable memory card, customers have the ability to store up to 1000 songs purchased from the Sprint Music Store, or approximately 330 MP3s from their personal collection.

Although customers do not need a data plan to purchase music using the Sprint Music Store, Sprint recommends one of several Sprint Power Vision Packs, priced at $15, $20 and $25 - all of which include a streaming radio channel from Sirius, streaming live news from ABC News Now, and unlimited Web and data access.

The Sprint Power Vision Network is currently available to approximately 130 million people nationwide and is expected to reach over 150 million people by early 2006.