We heard last week when Sprint launched the HTC Touch Pro at "select national retailers" that the device would be available online on November 2nd. Well, it's November 2nd, and they've kept their promise. The base retail price of the QWERTY smartphone is $579.99, but an "instant savings" of $180 combined with a $100 mail-in-rebate brings the price down to palatable $299.99 (with a 2-year agreement, needless to say). Of course, if you're really starved for human contact, you could always head over to a Sprint store and buy one in person, too.

Update: Had a little trouble with those read links -- all fixed now.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Now that the dust's settling in the wake of Nokia's Loudeye acquisition, Sony Ericsson reckons it's time to get down to business on their own direct-to-phone music downloads. The service (which they've previously alluded to) will be called M-BUZZ and will use its PlayNow service -- currently focused mainly on ringtones and games -- to get content onto the Walkman phone of your choice. Actually, that's not quite true: M-BUZZ will initially be rockin' only on the W850 and W950 series; not quite the sweeping, retroactive compatibility we'd have liked to see, but with the W950's generous legroom for tunes, we do think they picked the right launch phone. Sony Ericsson's saying they'll be first focusing on "new and up-and-coming artists" out of Sony / ATV's library (read: crap they can't find any other way to sell?), but they seem to be leaving themselves the option of significantly expanding the catalog if the service takes off.

In an announcement that has produced more questions than answers, Sony Ericsson has hinted that they'll be opening an online music store in the coming months, largely in response to Nokia's digestion of Loudeye. Of course, parent Sony runs Connect, so it remains to be seen how (or even if) the new service will integrate with it; if it does, this could be a trick way for Sony Ericsson to get more exposure with their Walkman devices than they've managed so far in the States. On the other hand, if the new service comes off feeling utterly unrelated with no value add for existing Connect customers and no motivation for adding a Walkman phone to their stable, the initiative could be dead on arrival. We're going to take a wait-and-see approach on this one; excuse us while we dump a couple thousand MP3s on our W950i.