The Spotify iPhone app will change your life. It won’t make you taller, less chubby or give you a charisma boost, but we guarantee it’ll make you smile a lot more, and flood your lugholes with more music than is reasonably healthy. Read our full Spotify iPhone app review now for all the details.
The Spotify iPhone app brings the holy grail of music services to the best phone in the world: all you can eat music, wherever you are, at a fixed cost.
If you’re not yet using Spotify we command you to stop in your tracks and install it on your PC or Mac. Give it ten minutes and you’ll be vowing never to use another music service again. It opens up reams of music for you to tap into, letting you listen to artist back catalogues or single albums. You can even build playlists and share them with friends, or let them collaborate and add their own tracks too.
It’s easy to see why Spotify is such a godsend to the desktop, but the mobile version is almost superior. See, those crafty music mavens have crammed in almost all the features from the desktop version into the Spotify iPhone app, and even included an offline mode which will cache playlists to let you listen when the iPhone has no network connection.
The Spotify iPhone app is incredibly fast, playing songs from the web in just a few seconds, even while using 3G. Spotify has also made its iPhone app smart: change something on the iPhone, like building a playlist, and you’ll see it instantly mirrored on your desktop version at home.
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The Spotify iPhone app is perhaps the best app we’ve ever seen for Apple’s handset. And that’s saying something. It’s slick, clever, and genuinely life-changing.
And now for the bad news. To use the Spotify iPhone app you’ll need to be a premium subscriber. That means shelling out £9.99 a month, or £119.88 every year. You can also buy a day pass for 99p, if you simply want to try the service.
Normally, we’d bemoan the pricing, but having been avid Spotify users for months we’re convinced its worth the outlay for ad-free music on-demand. However, there are a couple of flaws to the Spotify iPhone App, and unfortunately they’re things the makers are powerless to rectify.
Firstly, there’s the headphone remote. Anyone who listens to music on their iPhone will be used to double clicking the headphone button to skip tracks. Except doing so will quit the Spotify iPhone app and kick-start the iPhone’s iPod functions. Not cool.
And then there’s Apple’s insistence that the iPhone only run one app at a time, so you’ll have to quit the Spotify iPhone app to check e-mail, browse the web, or do anything else for that matter.
It’s a real pain, and one that can only be avoided by jailbreaking the iPhone, a hazardous endeavour that’s not for the faint hearted.
The sooner Apple sorts its act out and liberates 3rd party apps the better, although in the meantime the Spotify iPhone app remains an absolute must-install for any iPhone-owning music fan.
