Review : Nokia Music Plus for Windows Phone

I was sweetly surprised when I saw Nokia Music Plus was available for me ( in India) on the Lumia 820 which was actually gifted to us during the MWC meet up.  During the same period we had a chance of meeting Nokia Music Team where we got to see Nokia Music Plus App for Windows 8 & RT. In fact during this period I got to know more about this service and features.

Many of you may know that it comes with a 7 day trial period, so I thought of giving it a try. I guess the hardware comes from UK which is the only place where Nokia Music Plus is available and hence it worked in India.

To see if you have the Nokia Music Plus Upgrade option, Go to Nokia Music App, hit the menu bar and look for option which says “Upgrade to Nokia Music Plus”

My Experience:

If you are looking for a high quality music streaming service, Nokia Music Plus truly makes a great impression. You can enjoy the service without any glitches or hiccups as long as you have a stable Internet connection. What really surprised me is that it worked smoothly even over a moderate internet speed. I have a  512 KPBS connection at home. I tested it on a slow network on purpose.

It will cost you 3.99 USD or Euros or Pounds per month. This price is a steal if you consider quality and unlimited offline mix downloads.  So you can download over Wi-Fi and listen to music while on the move. This makes sure you are not spending even a bit on your mobile network.

These mixes are basically songs from different artists either from same genre or type. If you don’t like them, you can create your own mix by selecting the artists.

The lyrics feature is my favourite one and it scrolls on its own. This means if there is a song which is kind of complex for you to understand, the lyrics come in handy.

Missing Features of Nokia Music Plus App on Windows Phone

• You don’t have control over the mixes which you chose to download. All the downloads happen simultaneously which delays the availability of the offline mixes even more.
• Lyrics have to be turned on every time the song changes. I would love to have seen it automatically show up even if the songs changes.

Below are the features of Nokia Music Plus in detail. You will love it.

Features of Nokia Music Plus

Skip Unlimited Tracks:  Not every track is great nor it matches our taste, Nokia Music Plus makes sure you can do as many skips you ever wanted.

High Quality or the HD Music: Nokia Music Plus offers higher quality of music compared to Nokia Music. Its Dolby Pulse giving 192 AAC option over WiFi and 3G. Better the quality of music, higher bandwidth it will consume.

So Nokia Music Plus has settings which allows you to control quality depending on your network. You can choose WiFi for HD music and for Mobile network, that setting can be turned off.

More Offline Mixes: Download over WiFi and listen while you are on the move. This works even when you do not have internet connection. Music Plus raises the restriction on number of mixes you can download. If you have the space, you can have unlimited mixes on your phone.

Lyrics: This is something really brilliant. Many around the world love to listen to English music but don’t really understand it. The barrier is in the way it is spoken or understood.

Nokia Music Plus brings you Lyrics which automatically scrolls. Yup, As every line passes, the lyrics marker moves to the next line on its own. Launch the song you are listening to and hit the double quotes icon on the right top.

For some of the songs you will get a sorry message saying “Sorry, We can’t find lyrics for this song”.

Multi-screen experience: Once you get the apps for Windows 8 & RT and other devices, Nokia Music + will bring you multi screen experience.  These apps are powered by HTML 5 which means you can open in Web and stream music.