It's a good day for streaming music fans and even better if you are also a PS3 user. Sony released an Android app for their Qriocity Music Unlimted service, and best of all, if you're a new user and have a PS3, you can get a 6 month free trial of the service.
Sony's Qriocity service may not have the market visibility of Amazon's Cloud Drive or even Google Music, but it's a solid service. It is a fee-based streaming music service which pulls from Sony's library of over 7 million songs, which is less than half of what iTunes offers, but you'll still find just about all the music you may want (in an informal test looking for lesser known music only Prefuse 73 wasn't in the catalog, but Pocket Dwellers were), and anyway there's no iTunes streaming. All new users can get a 30 day free trial, then the service is $3.99/month for the basic package or $9.99/month for the premium. And, if you're a PS3 owner who had to sit through the recent PSN outage, you can even get 6 months of Qriocity for free, if you're a new member. But, be careful, if you are a PS3 user, you have to sign up for the service through your PS3 in order to get the 6 month free trial.
The Android app is fantastic. The UI is beautiful, bright and colorful. It's intuitive and easy to use. And, there are a lot of options to get instant playlists generated by Genre, Era or even SensMe, which creates playlists for different moods (relax, upbeat, etc) or time of day. There are options for saving artists or albums to your personal library, and getting recommendations based on that library, and even an option to sync your library to the cloud. Your library will then be available on your Android device, PS3, PSP and any other Qriocity capable Sony device. Of course once the free trial is up, most of these features will only be available if you are a premium subscriber.
Unfortunately, it's not all good news. The app is only available on Android 2.1-2.3.3, meaning no Honeycomb support, and more annoying, no support for 2.3.4, although at this point that really only means Nexus devices. Still, that OS compatibility does cover the vast majority of the Android ecosystem at this point. The installer is also huge, clocking in at over 30MB and it is copy protected, so there's no option to move the app to an SD card, even if you're using a rooted device.
Qriocity is a pretty nice service, so if you have a generous data plan and some extra space in your internal storage, it's certainly worth a try.
Michael Heller is known for his clear and informative articles on mobile technology. He explores important topics such as the rollouts of 5G networks and the advancements in mobile payments, offering readers insights into the evolving tech landscape.
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