On our recent trip, I had wanted to use the Samsung UpStage for some additional navigation, especially walking around or when it didn't make sense to have the Sony UX280P connected to a Bluetooth GPS and out in the open.  So, I went to search for the navigation application, Telenav, because I couldn't find it in the download menus.  It did come up, but then it didn't allow downloading of it because it said it wasn't available for my phone yet.  Strange.

I later found a hard link to the application in the menus.  Not too surprisingly, it was a link to download the application which isn't available for the UpStage yet.  It's strange to me that Sprint would allow that to happen.  A similar thing happened with the podcasting application.  The Samsung site claims it's not available for this phone yet although a version that works fine is preloaded onto the handset.

A couple of games are also preloaded onto the phone as well as the basic set of built-in applications, such as the video player.  I recently got a response back from an Ambassador feedback post I gave even before they'd shipped me the handset.  I was concerned that the form factor would prevent many applications from either being ported to it or even being able to function.  (I touched on the UpStage input issues yesterday.)

The response:

Absolutely the UpStage has the ability to play games, play music, text message and all other power vision applications that you are used to using on our handsets.

Well, where are they?  Every category I click on when browsing to "get new content" seems to be empty or broken.  There was even a section for "Free Gameloft Demos" but all the of the direct game links there resulted in an error saying that the game isn't yet available for my phone.

The phone shipped with five game demos: Midnight Bowling, Nightclub Empire DEMO, PAC-MAN / Ms. PAC-MAN DEMO, Tetris Demo, and World Series of Poker.  I haven't found a way to download any other games, applications, or email/IM clients.  Even the "What's Hot" and "What's New" application categories are empty.

Sure, there are plenty of wallpapers and ringers for download.  The music store works just fine as does the Sprint TV player and Sprint Movies. (I'll be talking about some of those later.)  There just isn't anything available yet.  The phone has been out for a few weeks, though.

Posted by Shane on April 27, 2007 8:25 AM | Permalink