Android

My HTC Desire and 7” Samsung Galaxy Tab went on ebay at the end of 2011 to fund my purchase of an Asus Transformer Prime. Through a £499 pre-order on ebuyer.com, I was lucky enough to receive this amazing Android tablet a few days before the official UK release and have now had a week or so to play about with it. Here are my impressions!   Hardware The UK version of Asus Transformer Prime is the 32GB Prime + Dock combo, tightly [...]

A reader of this blog sent me an email recently to ask how to search for an artist or song in playlists on Spotify Mobile. This would seem like a simple question with a simple answer. Unfortunately Spotify have made it rather difficult to do this, but there is a way to kind of get what you want. Read on for the solution! Reader Joe asked the following: “I’ve recently upgraded to Spotify Premium and am having trouble with it [...]

I use Spotify on my Samsung Galaxy S II Android phone every day, and its limitations are really starting to grate. I’ve already posted at length about how Spotify’s Android app pales in comparison to its iPhone counterpart (see the Spotify Mobile Faceoff: iPhone vs. Android), but there are some problems that I’ve gotten so used to that I wanted to step back and list a few things that really ought to be in there.   I’m [...]

Google Music Beta is a cloud-based music locker service that lets you store up to 20,000 tracks for free. You can then play back your music either via a Flash-enabled webpage or an Android smartphone app. The Android app includes an offline option to store local copies of your songs. I’ve been using Google Music Beta for the past couple of weeks, putting it through its paces and comparing how it handles versus Spotify. Overall I’ve [...]

SpotSearch is an app for Spotify Mobile (iPhone and Android) that finds a song on Spotify based on some lyrics you enter. In a way it’s similar to Shazam, but instead of playing it a sample of music you type in some words from the song instead. Maybe you have a tune in your head and you can’t remember what it’s called or who it’s by. If you know a line from the lyrics, use SpotSearch to find and play the song in Spotify. Using SpotSearch [...]

Spotify Mobile on iPhone and Android are both reasonably mature apps now, having been launched simultaneously back in September 2009. At the time, the Android version had a slight edge in terms of features, with its unique ability to Sync Over 3G, a What’s New area, and most crucially the ability to play in the background. But the iPhone version seemed to take priority at Spotify and within a few months it had caught up then taken the [...]

ShareMyPlaylists.com is the top Spotify playlist-sharing site. With close to 45 thousand playlists, no other playlist sharing site comes close in terms of catalog or features. SMP has just launched a free mobile app on two new platforms: the iPhone version has been out for a while now, but this week saw their arrival on both iPad and Android. TechCrunch have covered the iPad version, so here’s a look at ShareMyPlaylists on Android. ShareMyPlaylists [...]

Spotify’s new feature announcement is great news for its freemium users, casual listeners and iPod owners. If you’re one of these: rejoice! You can now benefit from cheaper-than-iTunes MP3 purchases, wireless syncing and Spotify-lite on your mobile. But for Premium users like myself there’s not too much here to get excited about. When I signed up back in ’09 for Spotify’s cloud service in the sky, I shifted [...]

Paul Brown recently wrote a great article on Why Spotify is an iTunes-killer worth paying for. In it, he mentions that you can sync your local music with Spotify on your mobile. This feature’s been around in Spotify for a while now but it seems that not everyone was aware of it. Instead of having to use cables or manually copy files to your phone, Spotify can sync them for you via WiFi. So to complement Paul’s article, here’s [...]

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab at the weekend and have now had a couple of days playing around with it. I wanted a tablet mostly to replace my Eee PC netbook, which I’d use for browsing and tweeting while watching TV or lounging about in bed. I bought an unlocked Galaxy Tab for £499 from my local Phones 4U store. It doesn’t need a SIM card so I didn’t have to take out any kind of contract: this makes it essentially a wi-fi [...]