Mobile commerce is back in the news thanks to an announcement from Sprint. Yesterday at the Mobile Marketing Forum, Laura Marriott pointed out to me that mobile commerce is the next big phase for mobile marketing. Today Sprint announced a new service that combines product and price search with location. Is the future of mobile commerce bricks 'n text?Let's take a look at the Sprint service:

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The service, which uses embedded GPS (Global Positioning System) chips in phones, allows shoppers to use their cell phones to find any of 85 million products available at 30,000 stores across the country. People type in a keyword, product name, model number or UPC number to search for the product.

This sounds good to me. I think the Sprint service, called Slifter, is a good start. Mobile commerce will be local, geotargeted product and price searching. While mobile banking is on the way, I think mobile product search is a better function than a complete mobile shopping experience. At least until all the issues with the transaction part of mobile banking are solved. And even then, mobile product search will be still be big.

Now, how do you get to the app?

The application, which can be downloaded onto certain Sprint phones, gives the nearest location and offers prices and promotional information. Shoppers can also save the items they want on a shopping list and share the lists with others via text messaging.

Sprint will charge subscribers $1.99 a month to use the application. This fee is on top of a data plan, which costs $15 to $25 per month, that subscribers also must have to access the application.

My issue, though, is that this service requires a download on the user's handset. As a rule of thumb, I am generally skeptical of any application that requires extra effort on the user's part to access (especially downloads). The few successes -- like Firefox and PDFs -- outweigh the failures.

What do you think? Is Sprint's new mobile product search a good indication of where mobile commerce is headed?