Nokia 5800 App Review: Audials Mobile

Missed out on Comes With Music on your 5800? Nevermind, there is an application which is as good as Comes with music if not better. Thanks to RapidSolution Software for bringing Audials Mobile on symbian 3rd and 5th edition devices, free music is just a three step process on your mobile devices. Free music on our phones! There must be a catch somewhere right? Yeah, as you might expect this is not a free application but its definitely worth every buck considering the service it provides.

Installation

Trial version of Audials Mobile can be downloaded for free from their official website here. The trial version is fully functional and lets you download two music tracks for free. The premium version with unlimited music downloads is available at a special introductory price of GBP 7.90 (normal price-GMP 12.90). Let see whether the price tag is justified:

: Default Screen

The default screen is nothing fancy, looks like a normal explorer but dont be fooled by its simplicity. Its basic but very much functional. Now lets start by searching for a song lets say, "Summer of 69":

A total of 83 tracks were found for "Summer of 69" in a search lasting around 30 seconds. To download the song, one has to just double click on the track and confirm the download. You can simultaneously download more than one track and downloading is a breeze. It took me like 60 seconds to download this track over wi-fi. The downloaded tracks can be accessed in "My Songs" of the default screen:

Not sure of what song you want? You can search by genre too. Just click on "Genre" in default screen and you can select from around 15 genres:

Different genres of music available

There are several sub-genres too like for hip hop, there are two further sub-genres: hip hop and rap. Overall its a pretty exhaustive ensemble of 80 different genres from more than 70,000 artists.

All the while we never talked about how this thing works. Its pretty simple actually. Audials Mobile downloads music from the several social web radio stations available on internet today. You can add more radio stations in search and record plugin section of the default screen.

Search and record plugins

You can find some plugins from their forum here. As of now, am pretty much happy with the default plugins and didn't bother to add any extra plugins.

So far I have been highlighting only the merits of this application. It does have some demerits too like:

Audio track not recognised: Out of the 84 tracks found for Summer of 69, I checked around 6 tracks (I didnt have the patience to check all the 84 tracks) out of which 4 tracks lead to this message, some before download and some after download:

Left Screen: before download, Right Screen: after download

No album art: There is no album art displayed in the default music player which is not a major faux but album art does come in very handy to organise your music collection:

No album art

Music library issues: I am not sure whether this is an issue with the music library or Audials. As you know, the music library needs to be refreshed every time new tracks are added to the collection. However every refresh just detect one new track, even when you have downloaded more than one track in a session of Audials. All the downloaded tracks are present in the library though, meaning this is not a serious bug.

Pros

Great collection of music to chose from covering 70, 000 artists across 80 genres
Easy to search and download tracks
Fast downloads
Works fine in both portrait and lanscape modes

Cons

User interface lacks to oomph factor
Not every track detected is downloadable
Videos are shown in the tracks found but cannot be downloaded
No album art

Verdict

Audials Mobile is one of the easiest and most practical applications available on Nokia 5800 today. Searching for music is easier than from on a desktop PC. Audials Mobile has transformed my cell phone to a state of art juke box with access to the hottest tracks on internet. Its definitely worth GBP 12.90 and go ahead and grab a license now at an introductory offer of GBP 7.90. Audials Mobile is a dream come true especially for Nokia 5800 users in regions lacking Comes With Music support. So Comes with Music or not, NOKIA 5800 is THE Xpress Music phone with tons of music to chose from.

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