PreCentral forum member jackofspeed submits this review of the Spotify webOS app and service, as he’s from the UK and can use Spotify

Here in Europe (the land from whence this author hails), Spotify is kind of a big deal. When their webOS app became available last week, it was the end of a 12-month wait for those of us lucky enough to be able to get the Spotify service. To most of you though (i.e. the United States) it may be an unknown commodity, and this is as much a review of the service as it is the app.

A quick summary is in order: Spotify is a cloud-based music streaming service, not unlike Pandora, but with one key difference – you can choose exactly the music you want to play. It’s as simple as that; if you want to listen to a specific artist’s new album, you just search for it and play it. What’s more, if you don’t mind a few adverts, it’s free to do so! Alternatively, you can pay £4.99 a month for ad-free streaming to a computer at 160kbps, or £9.99 per month for ad-free streaming at 320kbps to a computer or mobile device.

The more expensive of these services also allows for offline storage of playlists (limited to around 3000 tracks) so playback can continue in the absence of a data connection. The service also supports collaboratively editable playlists, scrobbling, and social links via Facebook or as web links which can be used in any way you wish. Incorporation of local music into playlists is now supported as well, so the Spotify app can really act as a hub for all your music on your Pre or your desktop. Yes, you understood that correctly, Spotify does what iTunes does, but with a subscription service like Zune Pass built right in.

But what about webOS? Well the Spotify app supports all the features described above, provided you have a Premium subscription. You can build playlists on the phone or on the desktop app, and they sync through the cloud between devices in a totally transparent way. Got a good Spotify playlist already? Install the app and it’s there, ready to go. You can hit play straightaway and it’s off, playing your music pretty much instantly. This works flawlessly over Wi-Fi, and pretty much flawlessly over 3G GSM.

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If you’re looking for an alternative to Pandora for your music streaming needs, look no further than Grooveshark. Unlike Pandora, Grooveshark allows you to play the songs you want and combines it with an advanced recommendation engine. Those recommendations are also tied into the playlists of other Grooveshark users you follow (assuming you and your friends have similar musical tastes).

Grooveshark’s webOS app debuted earlier this year and recently received a hefty update. The new Grooveshark 1.2.0 brings a long awaited notification area dashboard player for controlling the streaming music playback from within other apps. There’s also now a shuffle mode option for your playlists and search filters to better narrow your results. And if you happen to be in a poor signal area, Grooveshark can detect that and serve up lower bitrate tunes for continuing (if lesser quality) music.

The app has received a number of other smaller updates, tweaks, and bug fixes to bring it to the big one dot two dot oh. Check it out – Grooveshark is available for free from the Palm App Catalog, with full functionality offered through a $3 monthly subscription, which by the way, allows you to stream copies of your own music. Cool, eh?

Source: Grooveshark Blog

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There are myriad options when it comes to getting music onto your phone. There’s the straight-forward built-in music player app and there are internet radio streaming apps like Pandora. And let’s not forget podcasts in apps like drPodder. With all these options, there’s one place practically everybody listens: in the car. Sadly, webOS doesn’t have the fancy-pants remote control options available to our iOS-using friends, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t get your tunes into the car.

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We’ve asked you about your favorite apps and your favorite tweaks in previous editions of our ongoing PC Brain Trust series, and the topic this time is music.

There are a number of approaches to listening to music on our webOS devices.  We can sync our music manually by dragging and dropping files from folder to folder, we can use old versions of iTunes or programs like The Missing Sync to automatically sync music to our devices, or we can use cloud based solutions like DropBox and streaming solutions like GrooveShark to pipe music in without going through the hassle of syncing.  

With the myriad of options available, we have to ask:  how do you choose to listen to music on your phone?  Do you stream exclusively, preferring the variety associated with the huge libraries of music companies like Pandora and GrooveShark have access to?  Do you you prefer the fidelity and control offered by having high bitrate MP3’s and WAV files hosted locally on your device?  Or do you pursue an approach that mixes the two?

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Palm has historically been mum on the subject of sales numbers (with the notable exception of the Centro, one of the company’s few commercially successful products in recent memory), but using analyst reports, developer sales numbers and data from social networks such as Facebook, it may be possible to hazard a guess as to how many webOS based devices are in use throughout the world.

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Palm has historically been mum on the subject of sales numbers (with the notable exception of the Centro, one of the company’s few commercially successful products in recent memory), but using analyst reports, developer sales numbers and data from social networks such as Facebook, it may be possible to hazard a guess as to how many webOS based devices are in use throughout the world.

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Multitasking. Unified email inboxes. Multiple Exchange accounts. Welcome to the future, our iPhone-toting friends. Well, eventually you’ll get there. Apple last week provided a preview of iPhone OS 4.0, and it looked vaguely familiar to those of us that have been using webOS. There are two truly big features that will be part of iPhone OS 4.0, with multitasking being the one that most users will care about. The implementation, however, is less than impressive.

Here’s the thing, as Rene Ritchie over at TiPb has pointed out before, webOS’ cards metaphor for multitasking seems to be an extension of what Apple did for managing multiple open pages in mobile Safari, with a dash of gestures thrown in for good measure. If you were to ask me, I’d say that’s more than likely what Steve Jobs and Co. would have preferred to do (and probably were preparing to do) for multitasking on the iPhone. But as important as multitasking is for the future of the iPhone platform, their perception as a leading innovator is also important, so just copying what Palm has done would be a PR disaster.

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While there are all sorts of streaming music apps available for the Palm Pre (Pandora and Slacker, to name two), there’s one more service has made its presence known on webOS: Grooveshark. Their app, as demoed above, leverages Grooveshark’s popular and powerful recommendation engine to find other music you might like. Like Pandora you can rate a song up or down (smile or frown, in Grooveshark lingo), but you can also save playlists and songs for later repeat listening and sharing with other users.

What makes Grooveshark truly unique, however, is that users can upload their own content to the service. Like YouTube, you can upload whatever music or other audio you want (from your desktop, of course – that’d be too much for webOS) to Grooveshark. What makes this cool is that you can upload your own music collection to Grooveshark and listen to it from wherever you have an internet connection, be it on a friend’s computer or on your webOS phone using the Grooveshark app. Cool, eh?

Grooveshark is available now, for free, in the App Catalog.

[via: MobileCrunch]

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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The App Catalog has seen impressive growth since it first went live a little over 6 months ago.  Palm’s Early Access program brought in dozens of developers who have created over 1,000 applications in that time frame, and while we don’t have access to as many apps as other smartphone platforms do, there are a number of high quality ones that fit into all of the important categories.

With that in mind, we’ve created a list of the must have applications that have come our way in 2009.  If you’re new to webOS (you should also see our getting started guide), or have been with the platform for awhile and are unaware of how the Catalog has grown over these last few months, this is a guide for you.

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While user guides for the iPhone may be getting in trouble because they have the word “iPhone” in their titles, we’re seeing no such issues with the Palm webOS App Catalog. Landing recently in the App Catalog is Made Simple Learning’s first on-device guide for webOS phones: Made Simple for webOS.

The interactive cross-referenced guide stretches for some 1500 pages and covers just about every facet of out-of-the-box life with the Palm Pre. Made Simple for webOS features easy navigation that is claimed to get you to any point in the book with just two taps – and that’s something that we simply couldn’t dispute.

Not only does Made Simple for webOS cover how to use the phone itself, it also examines third party applications like Pandora and sync solutions like iTunes and doubleTwist. The guide also covers numerous tips and tricks, such as how to copy and paste text, work with Card view, and more. All of these tips, tricks, and how-to’s are accompanied by more than one thousand annotated screenshots.

Made Simple for webOS is available for download now in the App Catalog for $4.99.

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