For mobile music fans, there is no better app than Spotify. Offering you instant access to millions of songs on your Nokia Lumia 800, the great new Spotify app for Windows Phone should be an automatic download for all music lovers and adds great usability to the Lumia 800’s already excellent music features.
The tiny 1MB app downloads and installs on the Nokia Lumia 800 in seconds and you’re then greeted with the clean and easy to navigate interface. The look and feel of the app ties in nicely with the Windows Phone 7.5 design and, as with all high-quality apps, integrates perfectly into the Windows OS.
Check out our Nokia Lumia 800 review
When you first open Spotify on the Lumia 800, you’re prompted to login with either your Spotify or Facebook accounts. With that out of the way, you’re then taken to the app’s main page, giving you easy one-click access to your existing Playlists, Play Queue, People feeds and advanced Spotify settings.
To add new music to your Lumia 800, you can either enter artist, album or song names into the search bar on the main page, or you can swipe to the right to see the What’s New page; letting you browse the latest songs and albums from an eye-catching, illustrated tiled grid of album artwork.
Tapping on an album cover displays all the songs contained within and you can then either tap the Add To Playlist button to add the entire album to your Spotify Playlists, or you can tap any song individually to start it playing, with full album artwork displayed on the Lumia’s great 3.7-inch screen.
While the song is playing, you can skip to the next or previous track, play or pause the song and set the track to repeat or the whole album to shuffle. A range of buttons also let you easily add the song to your favourites, drop it into a playlist or even share it with your friends via Facebook, Twitter or IM.
Moving to the next track or the previous one is as easy as just swiping your finger to the right or left. And when you want to download the songs to continue listening when out of range of a decent phone reception, you can just tap on a playlist and then tap the Download button at the top of the screen.
For greater control over how Spotify works on your Nokia Lumia 800, you can enter the advanced Settings. Here you can choose whether to stream or sync with high quality audio, or to choose lower quality sound for smaller audio files. You can also set your Lumia to synchronise files over a 3G connection.
As you’d expect, when playing a song the music continues in the background even when you exit Spotify and use your phone for other tasks. And if you already have a Spotify account, the Lumia 800 will automatically synchronise with it, to bring all your favourites and playlists to your Nokia Windows Phone.
While the design and features of Spotify are nothing revolutionary, it is simplicity that is its strength. Making it easy to enjoy great songs in seconds. Spotify perfectly compliments the Lumia 800’s existing Nokia Music features and is without doubt the finest third-party music app for your Nokia Windows Phone.
Spotify is available now for free on the Nokia Lumia 800 via the Windows Phone Marketplace.