Review: Spotify for Windows Phone
- 14 February, 2013 13:37
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Spotify for Windows Phone 8 is a simple and well designed app but the lack of radio feature is a downside.
The Spotify app predictably follows the standard Windows Phone 8 interface theme. Large, clean fonts are set against a light background, though unlike the Windows Phone 8 UI itself, there's no option to change this to a darker background.
The live tile that comes with the app is a nice touch and it can be resized to small, medium and large. When set to medium and large sizes, the tile flips and displays current album art for any tracks you are currently playing.
The main menu of Spotify for Windows Phone displays a search box and allows one touch access to your playlists, any play queues, your friends list and settings. You can choose to access the app in offline only mode, stream or sync in high quality and set whether you want to be able to stream over a 3G/4G network in the settings menu.
Swiping from the right of the main menu scrolls through the 'What's new' menu, which shows a selection of new tracks or albums that have been added to the Spotify service. Tapping on the album art icon will take you into that album or track and you can add these to a playlist or share them via Facebook, SMS or email.
One notable and perhaps critical absence is the radio function, which allows premium subscribers to listen to music that's selected based on similar tastes. This feature is available on both the iOS and Android versions of Spotify.
The Spotify app is smooth and functional throughout testing, though it crashed a few times. This occurred more than once when we were attempting to download tracks to our phone.
Annoyingly, the app needs to remain open when downloading tracks to your phone, so this process can't be completed in the background.
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