Pandora’s Streaming App for iPhone
Posted by T Rex on July 13, 2008
Despite the glitches with the new iPhone’s I’ve been reading about over the weekend this new Pandora app is breaking new grounds in mobile music. I’ve been a fan of Pandora for a while and met the guys behind the technology at a recent music show in SF. I’ve yet to buy into the whole iPhone “have to have one” mentality but if these are the types of apps that keep getting released and enhanced I might have to jump on board.
The resulting Pandora App is a pleasure to use. Navigation is effortless, and feels nearly exactly like using the iPhone’s native iPod application, with album covers that slide from left to right as one song switches to the next and the same stations and 500,000-song catalog available on Pandora via the web. Songs stream in mono 64 Kbps MP3; the iPhone doesn’t support high-quality streaming codecs such as AACPlus, an omission Conrad calls “sort of disappointing.” However, the Pandora App sounded fine when I heard it on a 1G iPhone connected via the Edge network.
If you hear a song you like, you can rate it thumbs up or thumbs down, view the album art or find out why Pandora chose the song for you, as with the web version. All ratings count in your general Pandora profile for each station.
You can bookmark any currently-playing song or artist to your Pandora profile page, or if you hear something you really like, another click brings up the song for purchase in the iTunes music store. And yes, it’s possible to create new Pandora stations from within the Pandora iPhone App.
Read the entire Wired article here.
