Gadgetory

well this is Ellis with the verge checking out Spotify for iPad which launches today so the app is universal which means it's for iPhone and iPad while the iPhone app largely looks the same the iPad app is brand new completely customized for a large display so let's dive right into it first thing to look at is just like before Spotify is still very focused on playlists so in the playlist view you can tap Edit and you can remove playlists but unlike on the desktop app you can't rearrange things or anything like that there's still no sorting within the playlists you can just remove things create new ones if you tap a playlist you can go into it see what's inside of it you can rearrange songs within the playlist but you can't sort them so as you browse through the playlist you'll notice the pain interface which looks just like Twitter for iPad another thing that Spotify wants to focus on for all of their new apps it's not in the iPhone app just yet but they want to move in that direction is the long press instead of a swipe so you can long press something and you can star it you can add it to a playlist you can add it to your queue you can send it to a friend and it's kind of the same as before because that works because if you're swiping through your panes you obviously can't swipe across to use those commands so when you actually play a song there's a persistent player on the bottom of the screen at all times and if you tap the band art you can actually access those same long press commands like add to queue at the playlist if you tap the fullscreen button you can go into full-screen mode which Spotify is very very proud of another thing that's great about the new iPad app is that it brings it on totally new search features so so you can see I'm typing in The Strokes and as I'm typing it things start coming up instantaneously like The Shins and it's a unified search experience unlike the old apps so you can get playlists artists albums and finally songs within the search screen another cool thing is that search now works even when you're offline if you do want to download something offline you can do it kind of like how you used to within the playlists screen and once you tap the download arrow and select save to offline you'll actually notice in the bottom left corner of the app there's a little pie chart with arrows that go through it that indicates how far along your entire download is that's a nice feature that's unique to the iPad app if you move to the inbox you'll notice that every song that's been sent to you on Spotify is actually nested by person now as opposed to chronologically like it was before so as you swipe through you can see playlists and songs that friends have sent you categorized by person the what's new section is expanded from what it used to be on mobile on your iPhone but it's still not great especially compared to RDO the carousel at the top is nice looking but I don't know what those recommendations even mean or how they apply to me you can't really see what your friends are listening to in this app besides using the People Hub on the left side here so you see a grid just like you'd see on the Spotify desktop app and it shows everybody that you're friends with on Facebook that uses Spotify so there's no friending involved and if you tap somebody you can see all the playlists that they have published which is cool but I mean you can't really see anything else about them like what are their favorite songs what are they listening to in the last couple weeks the settings menu at the bottom left corner of the new Spotify app is literally exactly the same as what you'd find on iphone app you see crossfade which actually lets you adjust how many seconds you want to fade in and out between tracks and then you also have gapless playback which is a great new feature and this private session Scrabble the last dot FM show on Facebook you can turn that off if you want to listen to some guilty pleasures and then if you see stream and sync you can actually now change streaming and syncing quality all the way up to extreme which is 322 kilobits a second as a whole the new Spotify iPad app doesn't tread any new ground it just kind of takes what we've seen and packaged it into a pretty fantastic interface there's still such a focus on playlists and contrast to RDO and other solutions but as Spotify is convinced that that's the way to go at least for now so that is Spotify the new app for iPad