Are Sprint Movies worth it?
by Chris Ziegler 
posted Sep 19th 2006 at 4:26PM
It seems like staring at a sub-3 inch display for hour upon hour could prove to be a punishing experience, which is exactly what Sprint is asking bleeding-edge customers to do with their new Sprint Movies service -- but in practice, how does it pan out? LAPTOP Magazine spent a few minutes straining their way through Spiderman 2 on an SPH-A900 and found that the image quality and sound synchronization were both surprisingly good; in fact, it sounds like they'd actually have come away with a positive recommendation if it weren't for the fact that the viewer is restricted to an approximately 1-inch area of the phone's screen. Obviously, the screen's small enough as is, so we share LAPTOP's sentiment that Sprint needs to maximize the available real estate and provide a full-screen player if they're actually going to go through with this (especially at $4-6 a pop). Otherwise, they saw the occasional (expected) dropout, but came away with the belief that this might all actually make for a compelling product one or two iterations down the road. If true, we're hoping California drivers don't start feeling the urge to catch a flick on the 10.
Filed under: Multimedia, Reviews, Sprint
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dario @ Sep 20th 2006 1:00PM
"If true, we're hoping California drivers don't start feeling the urge to catch a flick on the 10."
HAHAHA thats a classic line.
but seriously, thats not worth it, watching a movie on a tiny screen.
flamer's grill @ Sep 21st 2006 11:25AM
I think the most pertinent comment in the entire article was this:
"With the screen adjusted to full brightness we were able to watch about 2/3 of the film before our phone’s battery died completely, which is about what we expected."
Not only will you not be able to finish an entire film, but you'll be stuck without a working phone afterwards. Sounds great.
Socko @ Sep 19th 2006 8:11PM
Sprint is at it again and again, but they never seem to have the hardware to support all there sweet services.
greenlight @ Sep 20th 2006 6:30AM
Wow, what a failure. I can't believe they can't even do full-screen landscape videos, even my ancient SE k750 could do that, for hours on end [admittedly not streaming].
starrwulfe @ Sep 20th 2006 2:12PM
Let's see...
Sprint has the PPC6700... Treo 700p, and 700wx. All of these have the screen real estate needed, battery supply, EVDO, and more importantly people who get PDA phones will more than likely have data plans and are more willing to view streaming movies on their smartphones...
So why don't any of these phones support sprint tv, or sprint movies??? DUH!!
jwill333 @ Sep 20th 2006 7:50PM
#5, Actually, the 700p does support sprint tv.