Digital Trends

LG Muziq November 25th, 2007 | by Damon Brown

Setup and Use

The Sprint Muziq is a music phone with a few enhancements, not a full-fledged Smartphone. The name isn’t a misnomer. Rather than being a flaw, Sprint concentrated on the phone’s strength and made a simple, versatile product.

The Muziq comes with a mini-CD which fits into any PC. (Note that it was tested and used on a PC, not on a Mac, and the instructions only mention PC requirements. Sprint may have an alternate package for Mac users.) After a five-minute setup, an interface called the Sprint Music Manager appears on the screen. It asks to find music on your hard drive, either in a specific place or on the whole thing. It will then take up to several minutes to collect the music, which gets listed in the Sprint Music Manager.

Along the top are the standard music control buttons (play, volume and so forth) and three tabs: Transfer, Get and Manage. Transfer is a drag-and-drop interface used by turning on the phone, connecting it via the miniUSB and moving music from the Sprint Music Manager list to the designated phone area. Get opens up the Sprint music area, a store front similar to the Apple Music Store. Manage lists the transferred song collection, organized by Song, Artists, Albums, Genre and the user-created My Playlists. iTunes users will adapt quickly (especially since Muziq can play Apple files, too).

The phone has a more straightforward, Java-based music player organized by Playlists, Songs, Artists and Genre. A pale background with simple text tabs, the interface is pretty generic. Don’t let it fool you. The sound quality is robust, even through the speaker, and the maximum volume is loud enough to project music across a quiet room. Close the phone and the aforementioned music control on the hood lights up. The music volume also seems to get higher, which may indicate another hidden speaker activates when the phone collapses. It also comes with Stereo Bluetooth so audiophiles can wirelessly connect the phone to their home system.

The Muziq main menu features the usual Sprint additions, such as Sprint TV, which features downloadable clips, and On Demand, a Reuters-like news service with the latest in sports, entertainment and business. It comes with a 1.3 Megapixel camera. The visual quality is OK, but well below anything in the Smartphone category.

Image Courtesy of Sprint