As we seem to be talking about music today, this week saw the launch of the Spotify client for Symbian S60 (both 3rd Edition and 5th Edition), and it seems to have been generally well received.  Granted there are maybe a few minor issues with the UI (it’s difficult to tell what music is available in offline mode) and some have (quite rightly) questioned the £120 per year cost of being able to listen, but not own the music.

Basically, if you like to listen to lots and lots of different music, potentially more than you own (in both music tastes as well as disk space limits) then Spotify may well be the solution for you.  It’s more expensive than Last.fm (which is more geared around giving you access to music you already own or is similar to your own music), but for many it’s worth the extra cost.  If, on the other hand, you don’t buy much music each month, and your current music collection fits happily onto your music device of choice, then maybe the cost of the Spotify Premium account would be better spent on buying more music, but for those that want to use the service, Spotify have added the Symbian client to their existing Android and Apple iPhone clients.

As we mentioned with the Spotify bundle deal with 3UK (here), you need to be careful not to over-use any 3G data connection you have, as music streaming can quickly eat through your monthly allowance, but by careful use of offline playlists and Wi-Fi connections, you should be able to listen to fresh music on a regular basis via Spotify.

To access and download the client, simply point your mobile browser to m.spotify.com, once downloaded, you’ll need to enter your Spotify account details (which needs to be a Premium account at £10 per month, no minimum contract period).  Even better, this version supports all Symbian devices, including those from Samsung and the Sony Ericsson Satio, so isn’t limited to Nokia devices.

Offline playlists are limited to 3,333 tracks (assuming you have enough space for all of those tracks), and every 30 days you will need to resync; if you go abroad, you can continue to use Spotify Premium in a country not normally supported by the service for 14 days, so you can have your music as long as your holidays aren’t too long (and you can afford the data roaming costs; if not; use the offline facilities which gives you a little longer anyway).

Another key difference between Spotify and Last.fm is that Spotify allows you to select an album to play, whereas Last.fm concentrates more on the artist, and will give you a selection of their songs, but not in strict album order.  Finally, both services limit you to 1 live online music stream, even if the same account has been configured in multiple devices.

With the limits on 3G data usage in the UK, and the higher cost than Last.fm (which can also be used on hardware devices), it’s difficult to see many people paying this subscription in the long term, but at least they are supporting a wide range of mobile devices.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.