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Google Music for Android

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Google Music was announced earlier this year with the ability to handle your music on their servers for free. The application is the mobile client for Google’s cloud music service and works on all devices with Froyo or newer. A quick run through of what Google music is; it’s a service that allows you to put up to 20,000 songs on Google’s cloud servers and access it from anywhere you have a data connection. The PC client takes all your music on your computer and puts it online so you can access it from all your devices. It’s free and you can put any song up there, and free up a few GB’s of your SD cards memory.

Available here: Android market

Version reviewed: v3.0.1

The Good
  • Server side backing up of your music is great so whenever you might lose your memory card or laptop, Google has it backed up.
  • The fast syncing, background, desktop solution is extremely useful and convenient.
  • With 20,000 music slots available, you should have more than enough room.
The Bad
  • The visuals of this application is a little disappointing on the actual phone application.
  • Without folder support, you'll have some songs you don't want go to Google's servers.
  • If you have a data plan, kiss it good bye. This could easily be the worst thing that ever happened to carriers since the iPhone.

Features & Functionality

Features for this application aren’t plentiful. This application was limited to tablets for months, but after a few versions were pushed out, the 3.0 version brought supports phones running 2.2(Froyo) and newer. Phones that can use this service will be able to access all the songs on Google’s server as long as you have a data connection. When you’re running without a data connection, you can still listen to all your recently played songs that are cached on your phone's SD card – which kind of beats the point. This app also has the ability to make a mix with all your songs in an instant, and that is a great feature that works on 3G and WiFi. The mixing was done was fairly quickly even when tested on T-Mobile's slower-than-Verizon 4G network.

Now the application itself isn’t as great as the service it brings you. It looks like last generation’s music player, with minimal animations. Google, being as awesome as they try to be, needs to update the UI of this application. It is nowhere comparable to other great music players like PowerAMP, Slacker, or HTC’s Music Player.

Conclusion

Google Music is a great a service especially for you Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners or those that just don’t want to waste their limited memory on music. It does take up a lot of your phone’s data while in use, so you should have an unlimited data plan before even using a service like this.

Recommend

Yes; if you're on a device that's running low on space and you have a lot of music, this is a great solution. Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners can now save their precious 16GB for pure movies.

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