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The main difficulty in making a music-enabled cell phone is where to put the controls. The designers of the Sprint UpStage (SPH-m620) saw that great untapped area on the back of the phone and decided to exploit it. It won't replace your iPod, but it's got an innovative style and it can carry a lot of music in a small space.

The UpStage has two screens and two sets of controls—one side for calling and the other side for everything else. We're impressed by the clever details of the design, but we wish it had spent a little more time in development. The controls can be difficult, battery life is poor, and the internal speaker needs help.

The UpStage comes in black and red, and is currently available for $79, after rebate and with a two-year commitment.

Design
The UpStage is a dual-band (850/1900) candy bar-shaped phone that measures 4.1 x 1.7 x .8 inches and weighs 2.6 ounces. That makes it surprisingly small for all the features it contains.

A Flip button on one edge lets you alternate between the two sides. Most of the time you'll use the phone side, which offers a tiny 175 x 65 pixel, 1.4-inch diagonal TFT display with 65,000 colors. This is the side you don't see in the ads.

Each side gives you access to different controls, and the phone side (see top image) is limited to making and receiving calls and accessing the call history, contact list, and text messaging controls (for sending messages, but not reading them). The phone side offers a clickable navigation button surrounded by two soft keys, a camera button, a Back button, and the standard Talk and End buttons. Below that is the dial pad.

The lens for the 1.3 megapixel camera sits above the phone side's screen. Press the camera button and you'll be prompted to flip the phone over—by pressing the Flip button—in order to see the image. If you press Flip a second time, the image shows up on the phone side's smaller screen, letting you take self-portraits. The phone supports PictBridge, for wirelessly transmitting pictures to compatible printers.

UpStage's music side (see below) is where all the excitement lays. Flip to its 176 x 220 pixel, 2.1-inch, 262,000 color, TFT/TFD display and you'll be hit with a yellow splash screen that looks a lot like an iPod ad. This screen offers three options—Sync My Music, Music Library, and Buy Music. To get the full list of other options, you'll need to press the Menu button.

The music side of the UpStage offers a mostly touch screen interface, with only the center Play/Pause button being clickable. The touch pad interface is the least satisfying thing about the UpStage, since it doesn't offer the speed or reliability of clickable buttons. There's a noticeable lag between pushing a touch pad button and seeing the result on the screen. Also, even after we'd adjusting the sensitivity we found it difficult to use. We were somehow always pressing options we didn't mean to press.

Playing games was often impossible. The controls weren't fast or accurate enough, and we were constantly selecting options we didn't want to pick—such as ending the game.

For a music phone, the UpStage has some poor listening options. The sole built-in speaker sounds harsh and tinny, and it's placed on the phone side, so if you have your UpStage sitting on a table with your song menu up, the sound is muffled.

Also, the phone doesn't come with headphones. The box includes an adapter cable which lets you plug in standard 3.5mm headphones, but that's a kludgy solution: it's just one more thing to remember to carry around. The phone supports Bluetooth stereo, but you'll need to supply your own headphones.