After what seems like years but in reality is only a few months, the Spotify iPhone app is finally here! Thanks to the good people at Spotify we have managed to see a demo of the beta version so we can give you our first impressions.
After installing it you see the nice little Spotify app icon on your homescreen, what a welcome site!
Once you have logged in you are presented with the “Playlists” screen, as you can see from the screen grab below they’re all listed in a nice easy to read list view and reflect the playlist you “own” in the Spotify desktop app.
So, we click on Kieron’s R&B Mixtape Volume 1 and you’re presented with this screen:
All the tracks are listed just as you would expect, notice the shuffle feature too. So I decide I want a bit of the mighty Jazmine Sullivan so here we go:
Clicking the info button brings you details of the album that the track was taken from, in this case “Fearless”
From there you can access the whole album and add individual tracks to your playlist. Changes you make here also appear on the Spotify app on your PC and vice versa. But for now let’s go back to the playlist screen for perhaps the most anticipated feature of the Spotify iPhone App, the “Offline playlists” mode.
So I press the Offline playlists button and this is what I get:
Awesome, so I simply select a couple of playlists to sync…
And after a minute or two (depending on how quick your wi-fi is) they’re synced.
As you can see the 2 playlists are now synced and ready to play offline. The big question is how many playlists can you store offline? Well believe it or not you can store unlimited playlists, as long as you take into account the maximum number of tracks you can temporarily cache is 3,333. So what about the search function? Let’s give it a go…
As you can see you can search for either tracks or albums. Importantly, this search doesn’t just search your playlists it searches the whole of Spotify. Cool. It’s really fast too, even on a 3G connection.
So there you have it, my first impressions of the Spotify iPhone app. What struck me overall was how intuitive it is to use, it’s just so very simple, exactly how a good app should be. I would, without hesitation pay the £9.99 a month that it takes to become a Spotify premium member to use this app, it’s absolutely awesome.
What remains however is if Apple will allow it into their app store. Spotify have submitted it and are now awaiting a decision from Apple. Some people are saying that Apple would be mad to allow it as it would have a negative impact on iTunes and MP3 downloads, however I don’t think it will. Although you can store playlists on your iPhone in “offline” mode you can’t do anything else with them. I.e. I couldn’t somehow burn them onto a CD and keep them forever. Sure, it’s great to have them on the iPhone but I’m convinced there are a lot of users who will like to either have them stored as a MP3 file or burned on a CD. Also, Apple have allowed a Last.fm and Pandora app so why wouldn’t they allow the Spotify app? Then of course there’s the 2 million (and rising) Spotify users who would be in uproar if they couldn’t get their hands on this awesome app. Over to you Apple.
