Sprint's best music phone so far, the silly-named "Muziq," costs one-fifth of the price and does a bunch of things Apple's ground-breaking phone (4GB version) doesn't do. Sure, it doesn't have the iPhone's amazing touch-screen interface, but hey, what do you expect for $100?

The flat, black (3.8 by 1.9 by 0.6 inches, 3.1 ounces) Muziq is the successor to Sprint's Fusic, and it's certainly handsomer than the Fusic, which in my opinion had a bit of a Fisher-Price appearance problem. There's a bright 128-by-160-pixel color screen on the outside of the Muziq, along with touch-sensitive music buttons that light up when they're active. Unlike the touch buttons on the iPhone, these bite back. Basically, the phone vibrates when you press a button, so you know you've pressed it.

Open the phone and you'll find a pretty bright but generally run-of-the-mill 176-by-220-pixel color LCD screen and a keypad of reasonably sized, flat keys. A dedicated camera, a speakerphone, plus music and volume buttons are on the phone as well. The Muziq is a little overbalanced, alas, so you can't sit it down open on a table. If you do, it pitches backwards.

As a phone, the Muziq is just okay. The device's speakerphone could be a bit louder, though the earpiece gets up to a pretty good volume. There's no in-ear feedback of your own voice when you're talking, either. Transmissions through the microphone and speakerphone, however, sounded very good on the other end. Reception isn't great; it was a notch behind that of my favorite Sanyo SCP-8400. Battery life was excellent for an 800-mAh battery, and the Muziq paired with both our mono Plantronics Voyager 510 and our stereo Pulsar 590 headsets. Thankfully, voice dialing doesn't require training and works over Bluetooth.

As a music player, the Muziq shares the Fusic's oddest feature: an FM transmitter, which lets it play music files through any FM radio. There are probably about 12 people in the world who need this, but the function will get them pretty excited. The phone takes 4GB microSD cards (which I confirmed) and loads up AAC, MP3, or WMA music at pretty much any bit rate (including lossless). You can also buy songs from Sprint's own music store for an eminently reasonable 99 cents per song. Sadly, the phone can't handle protected music bought from any other online store.

The best way to sync the Muziq is by connecting it to Windows Media Player, though the phone doesn't sync different playlists—only one huge list of files. Mac and Linux owners can drag-and-drop the files, send them slowly (39 Kbps) via Bluetooth, or use a PC-based memory card reader. I suggest the latter, because the Muziq takes about 10 seconds to sync each song over USB. Stick to music, by the way—my 3GPP-format videos played jerkily on the phone.

Sprint's music-playing client needs an upgrade pretty desperately. For one thing, it's slow to launch, poky at loading its list of songs, and sluggish at navigating through them. It's also just plain unattractive, showing your songs as a long text list and not letting you slice and dice by artist or album. It works best in shuffle mode, or simply playing through everything on your memory card.

You can listen to your music through the Muziq's single speaker; through a wired headset connected to the Muziq's standard 2.5-mm jack (we recommend the Plantronics MHS-213); or through a Bluetooth headset.

The Muziq comes with a Web browser rather than a simple WAP browser, but I loaded Opera Mini anyway. The application ran fine, though some other Java programs, such as Melodeo's Nutsie music-streaming program, didn't. The Sprint TV video service has gotten an upgrade since I saw it last, and now it has dozens of video channels, including full-length pay-per-view movies and entire episodes of ABC TV shows, though network problems on the day I was testing caused the Muziq to render the video choppily. The Muziq uses Sprint's high-speed EV-DO Rev 0 network to connect to the Internet; however, I couldn't get reliable speed test results because of the network problems. The Muziq's JBenchmark Java benchmark test results were decent for a midrange phone.

E-mail support is a huge step forward here. Sprint included a slam-bang client from Seven, which integrates AOL, Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo!, and POP/IMAP accounts in an attractive tabbed interface. It doesn't support attachments, but text is easy to read. It even alerts you when new mail has arrived; I got Yahoo! messages within 2 minutes and Gmail messages within 4, though my POP3 messages took 15 minutes to turn into alerts on the phone. The Muziq also supports AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! IM services.

The phone's 1.3-megapixel camera isn't great. In my test shots, it blew out bright areas and put a slight haze over my images, though color balance was decent. The 176-by-144-pixel video mode is run-of-the-mill for a midrange camera phone. You can print directly from the phone with the included USB cable and a PictBridge printer, but I couldn't get Bluetooth printing to work. You can also send your photos to your PC using Bluetooth or USB.

The Muziq is the first phone I'm reviewing after the iPhone, and it's funny how many features I take for granted on the "average" phone that the iPhone lacks. Yes, the iPhone is groundbreaking, revolutionary, amazing, yada yada yada. But even the humble Muziq has stereo Bluetooth for music, an over-the-air downloadable music store, high-speed data, instant messaging, push e-mail from multiple sources, and the ability to load third-party applications, for instance.

Okay, maybe it doesn't have a super-easy new interface or show movies on a huge screen. But for $100, the Muziq is the best music phone you're going to get from Sprint. If you want to listen to music on your Sprint phone, this is the one to buy.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 55 minutes
Jbenchmark 1: 1648
Jbenchmark 2: 177
Jbenchmark 3D HQ: 113
JBenchmark HD Gaming: 44 (1.5 fps)

Compare the Sprint Muziq LX570 with several other mobile phones side by side.