Sprint aims to outrun iTunes

Sprint handsets will allow users to buy songs over the air for £1.80 each

US carrier Sprint Nextel has launched a music download service for its wireless phones in a move seen as a direct challenge to Apple's iTunes.

Sprint will sell two phones that will allow users to buy songs over the air for £1.80 each through the Sprint Music Store, a virtual shop with 250,000 tunes from all four major music labels. This compares with 79p per song on iTunes.

The service transfers music directly to a phone as well as to a computer. Cingular's recently launched Motorola/iTunes Rokr phone requires downloads to a PC prior to transfer to the phone.

The Rokr is also only capable of holding 100 songs compared to around 1,000 on the Sprint phones when a removable memory card is used.

Subscribers will automatically get two copies of a song, one for the phone and one for their computer. They are also allowed to make one copy to CD using Microsoft's Windows Media Player software.

"It is not meant to be a substitute for your 30in TV or a substitute for your iPod," said Len J. Lauer, chief operating officer at Sprint.

The service, called Sprint Power Vision, costs £11 to £18 a month on top of a basic phone service. The handsets from Samsung and Sanyo cost from £270.

Nearly a third of US mobile phone subscribers send text messages, and 11 per cent use their phones to browse the web, according to research from M:Metrics.

In September, 2.14 million cellphone users either downloaded or viewed streaming video over their phones.