3:21 AM
Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and Music Unlimited. These are probably the most well-known and popular music subscription services available globally, and they are currently involved in a take no prisoners battle that can only benefit the regular music-loving tech-savvy user.
But while the competition should get the best out of online music streaming, there are still a few areas where neither service has managed to reach perfection. We are talking, of course, about the still steep subscription fees and the services’ sometimes-buggy mobile apps.
On the first front, there hasn’t been much movement recently and it almost seems like the competitors are in evil cahoots to keep the price bar high, but as far as that second inconvenience goes, we are noticing quite the involvement from the highly acclaimed streaming services.
No less than two of the “Big Four” have pushed some much awaited and appreciated updates to Android in the past couple of days or so, with Rdio quickly following Music Unlimited’s suite (or the other way around). Although we don’t want to compare apples and oranges, seeing as the two updates don’t have much in common, we have to say that Rdio seems to have put a bit more effort into the new Android app than Sony did in its Music Unlimited update.
The 2.2.1 version of the Rdio Android app, available for download over on Google Play, comes with quite a few cosmetic changes, but there are also a bunch of new features and functions added, as well as a number of bug fixes. The UI improvements and enhancements are actually too numerous to mention here, but you’ll definitely notice how you can organize new releases in a grid view, jump from a song in a playlist to the album where it came from, and more easily edit and add playlists.
You’ll also be able to take advantage of a much better organized search section, with optimized and extended results, while the activity stream has been updated with new clickable URLs. Finally, the update’s changelog also mentions some “miscellaneous bug fixes”, which will most definitely make up for most of the problems that popped up with the app’s February update.
Hopefully, the new upgrade will not bring some bugs and glitches of its own, which would mean that we could finally enjoy the app on truly any device running Android 2.1 or up, as it has been promised for a while now.
Exactly like Music Unlimited’s latest update, Rdio doesn’t come with any specific support for Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet, but unlike Sony’s service, we don’t have much to worry about. In fact, we’re willing to bet that Rdio 2.2.1 will work beautifully on the new 7-incher, so go over to Google Play no matter what Android gadget you are using and download it with confidence.
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