Dell Streak app review: Google Music Beta
This guest review was written by Brett Kaminski.
Most of us Dell Streak users have been anxiously awaiting news of El Goog's foray into the hyper-competitive music space, especially since Amazon launched their Cloud Drive player and Apple's expected to launch their iCloud next week at the WWDC.
Music Beta, announced at Google I/O in May, is still closed and requires an invite to use, but I was lucky enough to get my invite on Wednesday and spent all day yesterday with the service.
Initial thoughts are extremely positive! Google does an amazing job of making the setup fool proof. It took about 2-3 minutes to get the Music Manager desktop application installed. After the application installs, all you have to do to upload your library into the cloud, select where your music is stored, and off it goes!
Since my primary music software is iTunes, I just clicked "Apply" and "Ok" and went to sleep. Now I have roughly 25GB of music, so when I woke up the next day it was only about 66% done, which was more than enough to start testing the service on my way to work.
I take the Metra into Chicago every day for work, and I lose my data connection a lot due to random dead zones. Imagine my surprise when Music Beta on my Streak didn't stop playing once! I won't lie; I had my doubts as to how well this would perform without a constant data connection.
The interface looks great on the Streak's widescreen, and flipping between songs and albums is buttery smooth.
With a maximum of 20,000 songs, Music Beta easily holds all of my music with plenty of room to spare. The web interface is very smooth and responsive and has a Apple Genius-like feature for making playlists from one song. The added benefit of not having to use Pandora and worry about going over my 40 hours per month limit is a godsend.
All in all, depending on how much Google ends up charging for this service (it's free right now), it will definitely be worth a look!
I know of a few people over on the forums that also received invites; if you're already using the service, what did you all think? If you're not, then hit up the link below and log in with your Google Account to request a Beta invite.
[Google Music]This guest review was written by Brett Kaminski.
