I don’t usually just repeat official announcements (I assume that if you’re here then you probably check the regular Spotify blog too), but since I’m a Google Android user I had to post this:
Here’s a brief overview of (and a bit of speculation on) the five main tabs seen in the video:
Playlist tab – Shows all your playlists. Scroll through them then select one to play, or click thru to play individual songs. Adding a playlist on your desktop version of Spotify auto-adds it to the playlist tab on your Android. Click Offline Sync button to select playlists for time-shifting i.e. store (cache) a local copy for when your phone is out of range.
Search tab – Keyword search, with tabs to filter results by song or album. Surprisingly there doesn’t seem to be an artist tab.
Play pull-up blind – Displays album art and player controls: Play/Pause, Next/Previous Track, jump to position, and an information button. If this is anything like the leaked iPhone demo from February, clicking on the album art would bring up a volume slider as well as shuffle and repeat buttons. The info button may contain the artist’s biograpy info, or possibly options to Buy From 7digital.com or Buy From iTunes.
Unknown tab – An exclamation mark would usually imply some kind of warning list or error message. I’d be surprised though if this was required and so prominently featured, so I expect this is a temporary tab icon. Perhaps this will be for playback options such as shuffle and repeat, or it could click through to a general home page to display what’s new or the play queue.
Settings Tab – Can disable online mode here. Will probably have options for cache size and Last.fm scrobbling. I’m speculating but this may also include settings for headset buttons, how lists are sorted (by track, artist, or album), auto-rotate, album art resolution, clearing the cache, and persistent icon options.
Now that it’s a little clearer how the time-shifted caching will work on mobile, this might be a good time to check your data limits with your mobile operator. My G1 is on T-Mobile UK whose unlimited internet option actually has a limit: their fair-use policy keeps me down to 3GB a month.
Note that Spotify have confirmed that the mobile version of Spotify will be available to paying subscribers only.
Oh, and kudos to Spotify for using a track from Róisín Murphy’s excellent synthpop album Overpowered to demo this – now that’s what I call music!
Here’s another video demo, featuring Spotify’s Gustav:
Front 242 eh? Im Spotify rhythmus bleiben!