The widely popular music streaming service Spotify has finally brought their service to the iPad with a native app and the full Retina display experience. Instead of a separate “HD” app like some services release, Spotify has updated their iPhone app to become universal, now including access to 18 million songs in a beautiful way on your iPad.
The Spotify iPad app is here!
Listen to the world’s music collection on your iPad. Enjoy millions of songs in an instant. Love, discover and share music like never before with the Spotify iPad app.
- Simple to browse and explore the Spotify catalogue
- Retina graphics for iPad and high-definition album art
- Search for playlists, users and music – all from the same view
- Discover what’s hot, and find trending playlists & songs among your friends
- Inbox grouped by user for easy searching
- Perfect as your living room stereo – full-screen view and AirPlay integration This iPad app reminds me a lot of Twitter’s with its swipe gesture-heavy interface that involves lots of swiping left to right in order to get from one screen to another. That’s not a bad thing, but I would have hoped to see something a bit more original — maybe a really well-designed app like Rdio for iOS.
Spotify itself is pretty reliable, though they do require that you have a Facebook account to use the service which is kind of annoying. Other than that, there’s a big war between them and Rdio. If you want music, then go with Spotify because they have a far better collection. If you want a better design and far better apps, then I’d personally recommend Rdio any day. But hey, it’s probably best to use whatever your friends do since you’re probably looking to discover some music.
If you already own Spotify for iPhone, then just go update it to version 0.5.0, which brings gapless playback and cross fading to this version, along with two bug fixes. If you don’t own it, then consider trying out Spotify on your iPad. There is a 48-hour trial of the $9.99 per month Premium service, so go discover some music and tell us what you think!
Additional fixes and improvements:
• New: Gapless playback and cross fading.
• Fixed: Offline synced playlists can no longer be removed by the system.
• Fixed: Crashes related to updating playlists or starring tracks.