We've seen the Spotify iPhone app in detail and it's pretty damn good
Here’s what I found:
The Radio feature of the desktop software is not present in the iPhone app, nor is Play Queue. Otherwise pretty much all the essential features are there.
You open up the app and see your playlists. You select a playlist and – even over 3G, not WiFi – the track streams almost immediately.
If you tap Offline Playlists and you select what you want to play when you are out of range of a 3G signal, the playlist will sync to your phone. Offline playlists need to be synced over Wifi, hence why its clear there is some kind of download happening here.
Playback resumes where you left off after closing the app. While you’re playing a track you can click the “i” button and add the track or the album the track is from to your playlists.
You can also set up new playlists directly within the app. Any changes you make to playlists etc are synced with the desktop version. You can search on tracks, though not artists right now.
However, the biggest surprise is that the app works very well just over 3G. The latency between tracks is only slightly longer than over WiFi. The sound quality is, to my ears at least, excellent.
This is going to be Spotify’s killer feature – as it is on the desktop – the ability to play any track in their catalogue with no latency. Is the Spotify app the first P2P app on the iPhone? It looks like it might well be. LastFm’s iPhone app is pretty good but their latency – since the data has to stream in with no P2P software to help it – is much greater and discernible to the ear. Plus of course Last.FM is really a radio station not the proverbial celestial jukebox.
Lastly, co-founder Daniel Ek said something this week which makes me 99.9% sure this app will be approved for the iPhone app store: “We have a great relationship with Apple, think the iPhone is awesome and absolutely expect them to approve our app in the next few weeks. Apple has already approved several other music services such as Lastfm, Deezer and Pandora. We very much look forward to people being able to access their Spotify library wherever they might be and we’ve spent significant time and resources to ensure we’ve stuck to Apple’s developer guidelines point by point.” (Our emphasis).