I love music, but being a student, more often than not I can’t afford to buy the latest album I want to listen to. For example, I wanted to buy 5 or so albums to take with me on holiday last week, which would have cost around £30. Instead, I decided to buy a month of Spotify Premium for £9.99. That includes offline mode, enhanced sound and premium content not available on Spotify free, as well as access to the mobile app. The Android version is very sleek, but is it worth £9.99 a month? Read on to find out.

Music is the best remedy and Spotify proves it exceptionally well. The app is truly amazing to manage all your music-related-requirements that are stored and categorized in a way that you could listen to your favorite just with a tap on the app. Spotify comes free of cost for mobile and tablets and thus you can listen to the right music wherever you want. Apr 17, 2019 Xpotify at its core is a wrapped version of Spotify's PWA. It has several Windows 10-specific features added to it, but the first thing to do is compare the portion of the app that is made from. So I have Spotify on my phone, and I also have it on my desktop. The Spotify on my desktop is an old account while the app on my phone is a newer account that I use instead of the old one. I wanted to log into my newer account on the desktop, but I don't know the email used for the account on my phone. May 03, 2017 Spotify’s music collection can be accessed through different ways. Spotify’s mobile app version has a slide-out menu that appears when you swipe from left to right. The burger menu at the top left of the screen shows different sections of the application. The search bar at the top of the app allows you to search for any song or album. Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs. We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes.

The first thing I noticed about the app was that the user interface is very slick. Along the bottom you have five tabs, Playlists, Search, Home, More, and a special one with a Play arrow on it. The latter can be dragged up like the app drawer for the 1.x devices to reveal the currently playing playlist, or the last played song and playlist if nothing is playing. This drawer includes playback functions, track name and artist. It also includes album artwork that you can slide left or right to skip back or forward a track, a star for adding the song to your Spotify favorites, and an Info button that brings up artist name and album name (which can both be clicked for more information). This pop-up menu also includes Add to Playlist, Repeat and Shuffle buttons.

The home tab brings up a page with 3 more tabs at the top: What’s New, Top tracks and Feed, which shows info on what your Facebook friends are up to on Spotify and news from Spotify themselves.

The app also functions well. Playlists are synced almost immediately from the desktop app, and you can then long press the playlist in the Android app to bring up a menu with the option to have it available offline. Offline syncing is set to only commence over Wi-fi, but the setting can be changed so it will sync over 3G. You can also access a list of your offline playlists on the playlist tab, and easily check and un-check playlists for offline use as you see fit.

I didn’t get much chance to test out how well music streamed in the app because it doesn’t let you stream over 2G which was all I could get most of the time. I managed to stream a couple of songs at one point, and it seemed to work fine, but really with offline mode and a big SD card I didn’t need to stream all that often. Before I went out I just connected to Wi-fi and stored all my favorite tracks in offline mode.

Overall, Spotify is a very well made app and has lots of nice little features, but, for me, is not worth £9.99 a month–at least not every month. New albums I want to listen to don’t come out often enough for it to save me money. But for those of you who love music more than I do, and buy a couple of albums every month, it is well worth it. Having said that, you don’t have the feeling of ownership over the music: once you stop paying the monthly fee, your Android app is gone and with it all the new portable music you’ve been listening to. I would definitely suggest giving it a try though, just pay for a month and see if you like it, £9.99 is not a lot to ask for an endless supply of music for a month.

Note: Spotify is currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

What we’ve got right here today is the PREMIUM version of the BETA release of Spotify for Android as it exists right now, here, today, in the United States of America, and we’ve gotta show it to you. Spotify is a music streaming service that’s been active for right around 2 years in the UK and is now blasting forth in the USA with a BETA trial. They’ll have their full service live SOON and what you’re going to find here is the sweetness you’ll be experiencing if you grab the $10 a month Premium service, that is, working on Mobile. Spotify has an app for Apple’s iOS and for Android and they’re very similar – the one you’re seeing here is on an Android.

Before we begin, let me thank the fine folks at Spotify for finally granting us an audience, us poor defenseless colonies with our lack of a perfectly awesome music streaming service like what we’ve got here now – what took you so long?! Now that you’re here, Spotify, I thank you, you’ve got a service that’s about to chop up essentially all the competition here in the states and serve it up for breakfast. You’ve got a $4.99 monthly plan that gives people a month’s access to your desktop-based service, that is, infinite use of the entirety of your massive library of music, or $10 for that and mobile usage of that same library.

Save some of it for offline use or stream it all! Make sure you’ve got infinite data on whatever plan you’re on, folks, and let’s go!

What have we got here?

It’s an application for the music service known as Spotify. What Spotify has is a massive music library which you can basically rent the use of anywhere you’ve got internet. You can choose one plan for $5 a month that’ll give you this service inside your home or on your laptop, or you can pay $10 a month and have that as well as access on your mobile devices – this is what we’re looking at now.

The App’s Basics

When you open the app, you’re brought immediately to your Playlists. This is a screen that shows all the lists of music tracks that you’ve made in the past along with the music you’ve got physically on your device, tracks you’ve starred as your favorite, your library of tracks showing everything you’ve put on a list in some way or another, and your inbox. Each of these options brings you right to the music.

There’s a button designated Offline playlists which brings you to your lists of songs with the option to download copies of them for offline usage, this being really quite helpful for you users of mobile devices in low-coverage areas or if you’re worried about going over your monthly data usage cap. There’s also a meter which tells you how many transactions, or “syncs” you’ve got going on, and a few options at the bottom of the screen.

At the bottom of the screen you’re able to access search, hit a What’s New button, or hit a More button which will bring you to Settings, About, and Logout. The big gray arrow in the center bottom of the screen leads you directly to the track you’ve got playing – drag it up!

Currently Playing Screen for Tracks

Basically no matter where you are in this app, you’ve got access to the “now playing” screen with the album cover of whatever music track you’re listening to, a slider showing you how far into the track you are, and some next, back, and play/pause buttons in the middle bottom. To the right and left of these are a star and an i. The star adds the track to your Starred Tracks list in your Playlists.

The i button leads you to information about the Artist, has a link to a list of all the songs by the artist you’ve got in your library, and you’ve got the ability to star shuffling songs from here, repeating this track, and adding this track to an existing playlist – we’re hoping for a “new list with this track” option soon.

Inside the information about the artist, you’ll be able to see some excellent biography paragraphs, another list of the songs you’ve got that they’ve made, and a link to Top Hits made by the artist that are available from Spotify. All of this appears and acts severely well thought out, planned, and executed.

FUN TIP: swipe the album cover left or right to access the next or previous track. This is the most appealing visually when you’ve got a playlist of many different albums, but works on a single album too.

Inside a Playlist

Another important bone in this body is the playlist. It’s here that you’ll create the lists of music you’ll want to access later, same as you would on any other digital music service, but here with a set of options that include the following: you’ve got the ability to “star” each track from this list, and you’ve got the ability to tap a track to begin playing that track and get into the Currently Playing screen.

These lists are created to show you the information you need and nothing more, starting with the title in bold and in white above the artist and the album in a slightly darker gray, nearly the darkest behind this text for each track’s box, another darker gray for the empty star holes, and the darkest gray reserved for the top bar and the bottom set of shortcuts. The top bar displays the playlist title, the bottom is the same as we discussed above, with Playlists, Search, Arrow leading to Current Track, What’s New, and More.

FUN TIP: Long-press a track in a playlist to access all the options for that track you’ve ever dreamed of! You’ll see Remove Track, Queue, View Album, View artist, Share track (with people outside of Spotify using your own compatible services,) and Share to Spotify People. This last option connects to your Inbox, the same Inbox that was mentioned above as being part of Playlists. I smell social interaction of a very giant kind.

What’s New

The option to the left of the Current Track option is What’s New, a shortcut which leads you to three tabs, the first of which is What’s New. This is a list of all the newest albums to be released on Spotify. You’ll notice some gigantic names already, many of them with albums that’ve VERY recently released these albums to stores. Beyonce! I just saw you in Target, what are you doing here, do we shop at all the same stores?! I love your album 4, which just so happens to be on Spotify, conveniently!

Next is Top Tracks, this being the tracks most selected on Spotify. You’re going to see the same list you’d see on pop radio if you listened to pop radio: Rolling in the Deep by Adele, Last Friday Night by Katy Perry, and The Edge of Glory by Lady Gaga. The long-pressing of a track tip works here, too, share and save away! Finally there’s Feed, this being a place where the Spotify team can send you, the power user, all sorts of insider information that you’re going to just love to know.

Settings

The Spotify team appear to have run into some interesting dilemmas while they were working with the UK population, because this is a really rather complete settings page – I can tell without even having used this app for a super extended period. /spotify-desktop-client-communication-failed-mac.html. You’ve got the ability to push Spotify offline, no questions asked, you can choose to only sync over Wi-Fi, only sync over 3G, or both, and you can choose which bandwidth you’d like to use to stream. You can also choose to sync only in the highest quality if you wish, you can scroble your information over to last.fm, and you can clear out your saved data altogether with a simple button press.

Whoa, last.fm – the collaborations begin here! We’re wondering how many groups will work or clamor to work with Spotify now that it’s going to explode all over everyone’s face in the USA – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, we’re looking at you! There’s also a couple of System Settings down at the bottom past a shortcut, one of them giving you the ability to change your Wi-Fi settings, the other allowing you to change your Bluetooth settings. Both of these literally shortcut you to your own basic Android settings for the whole device, not just this app.

Portrait VS Landscape

While this app certainly does work just fine in landscape mode, we’re gonna go ahead and suggest you go for the portrait mode at all times. That said, the landscape mode of every screen may not be pretty, but it works really well. The user interface hasn’t been sacrificed anywhere other than a couple tiny areas we’re certain Spotify is working out with their developer team now.

Audio Quality

I’m almost embarrassed at how nice the music sounds, and I’m talking about streaming the music Spotify has in their library, and at all times, not just when I’ve got some magical 4G connection. One of the devices I used most when testing this app out has been the myTouch 4G Slide, a T-Mobile device that should be connected, if the maps are right, to T-Mobile’s 4G network here in Minnesota all the time. It does, however, occasionally turn down to 2X instead of 4G. Spotify doesn’t care, it just eats that 2X for breakfast, look at it go! That’s not to say that you can’t continue to use your device while you’re playing music at the same speed you’d have been going without the app open and working, also nay. Do it all!

User Interface Quality

It appears that whoever Spotify has working for them in the interactive design department also designed sliced bread, because using this app is EASY. And it’s not just easy, it’s enjoyable. You can play all your favorite music and you WANT to play all your favorite music, too. Much in the same way Google is experiencing a major influx of interested and extremely willing to participate participants in its Google+ social networking project, so too will Spotify pick up a pack of ravenous fans here in the states. It’s basically inevitable, so says I. It all comes down to how “exclusive” the Spotify team keeps the whole system AND how well they advertise on all circuits.

Wrap-Up

I’ve got a car stereo with an audio jack that allows me to plug my Android device in with style and grace. Now that I’ve got Spotify, I have the entire WORLD of music at my fingertips. In the short time I’ve had the chance to enjoy this fabulous service, I’ve only come across a couple rare tracks that weren’t a part of Spotify’s library. MOST of the artists and albums I enjoy are sitting right here at the other end of this devices’s internet, and now I can play them wherever.

This service takes the cloud, fills it with music, and carves out all the effort. This service, if everything we’ve seen thus far continues at the same quality and delivery, is more than worth the cost of the premium account. Believe it!

You can purchase Spotify for yourself now at Spotify.com/US/Hello-America/

Spotify Mobile App Critique App

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