IntoMobile

Breaking news, information, and analysis on the latest mobile phones and mobile technology

Open NavigationOpen Search

Pandora For Android

by - Leave a Comment

When searching for a new way to listen to music, you’ll most likely start by looking at Pandora. Pandora has earned a reputation in the music streaming market as the #1 service, and there’s good reason for that.

Pandora has been serving quality internet radio stream service to millions of users for several years, and their iPhone and Android application brings that great service to your mobile phone. Their applications have won many awards for the great service it provides to their users like; MTV Music Award for “Best Music Discovery Service,” and even made it on Time’s 50 Best iPhone Apps 2011. Pandora is the number 1 most used muli-platform music streaming service and with it’s millions of users, huge catalog of multi-genre music, and simple UI, there’s no doubt why it’s the go to service for this category.

Available in the App Store & Android Market

The Good
  • This application and it's service are available for free, but an option for a ad-less listening is available to those willing to pay.
  • Everyone can customized their music experience to perfectly suit their liking
  • The wide availability of their service on all the major platform makes it the easiest streaming service to use.
The Bad
  • This application uses a lot of data to stream your music, so if you're trying to save a few dollars, this isn't going to help you.
  • The lack of preset categories and channels like with Slacker makes it less useful
  • This service has been found on several occasions to leak personal data, and that's cause for alarm to some

Features & Functionality

The Pandora application has not been in the market for more than a year, but it's already made it's mark on the top most downloaded free applications. The app gives you access to Pandora's millions of songs, all from your internet connected mobile phone. Users must sign up for a Pandora account, but when they do they are given access to everything the website offers while on the go.

Unlike Pandora's number one competitor, Slacker Radio, they do not offer preset stations so you'll have to make your own personal station to be able to listen to music rather than pick a station like "top 50 songs" like you'd be able to do with Slacker. The Application also has a very low 12 song skips per day limit and after 12 skips with any channel you're stuck listening to whatever is playing regardless if you list it or not; but if you opt for the premium service, you won't have any limits.

  • Tap the album art to see a progress bar, create a station from the current song or artist, or email the current station to a friend.
  • Read artist bios on the flip side of the album art.
  • Rotate to landscape to see recently played songs in coverflow.
  • Play song samples for all of your song bookmarks.
  • Create stations based on genre

Conclusion

Finding an application that does everything Pandora does and for free is less than hard, but no one has such a massive community of developers working on perfecting their mobile applications, and while they might not offer the largest song collection, they have quite a nice amount of music to pick from.

This application is available for desktop users, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry users that want a personalized radio experience and don't have to pay to get it.

Recommend

Yes, considering this is a free services, there's no reason to say no. I would recommend you try both this and Slacker radio and see which one your end up liking more; I am a Slacker user, but some of you might see otherwise.

Back to top ▴