Audials Mobile is an application that lets you download music for free down to your Symbian-powered handset. The application promises to be easy to use and that you don’t need additional software to dub your music. It also promises that user made plugins will allow you to download music from many radio stations and that you can simply relax on your couch while doing so. We’ve taken a look at how good their promise is and how well the application performs in finding music that you like.
Brief introduction
The application comes in two versions, a free one called Audio Mobile Trial and a paid version called Audio Mobile Premium. The free version is limited to two recordings pr. day while as the paid version lets you perform unlimited recordings. The application can be further enhanced with plugins developed by the community and basically what these plugins do is that they let you search for music from other websites. Application is said to support most of the Nokia handsets such as the N86, N97, E72 as well as some selected phones from LG and Samsung such as the Samsung OmniaHD / i8910.
Application overview
I tried downloading the Audials Mobile Trial and installing the application only takes around 600 kb and download size being 412 kb, which is a nice start. Going through the usual installation prompts there were nothing much interesting to see there. Finally firing up the application you are met with a pop up stating that the application will use various functions in the phone such as connecting to the internet, using the built in music player and so on. There is also an email address where you can email them if you have concerns regarding your privacy. That is something at least I like, but I don’t know about you. This prompt will disappear if you hit the left softkey answering yes to it unlike the next pop up which is the welcome screen. The welcome screen displays a warning that the music you can search for and record can be copyrighted and that the url of the website offering a particular track is displayed. Then follows the intro that the Premium edition of the application can perform unlimited recordings whereas the Free edition only can record 2 songs pr. day.
From the main screen you can search by typing in e.g. an artist or you can choose genres to browse through the different music genres. A third option is for managing plugins which I’ll come back to. The left softkey brings up options in which you can register, send the application to a friend via SMS or configure application settings (as well as the usual Help, About and Exit options). From Settings you can define a default access point, recording path, whether the application should automatically check for updates as well as manage plugins. Under plugins you can find two default ones that comes with the free edition of the application. From here you can disable and update the plugins as well as install new plugins, which however must reside in your phone.
Application in use
I started to go briefly through the genres and it offered quite a lot. Going into each genre reveals sub genres. However loading and searching time was slow. As I knew exactly what I should try to search for I used the search option instead.
First I tried searching for the artist Evanescence by typing it into the search field. It was awfully slow and took some time, so make sure you have a good connection before you try proceeding to use this application and as you can see the results comes up as it loads. On the second try I was searching for Sting which brought me no results. After a timeout I was met with that the search failed and that I could speed up the search by installing 3rd party search and record plugins with a link to a portion of their forum website. Those plugins again were hosted on webhosting sites such as rapidshare and filemanager and as they are not mobile friendly the experience was devastating. I decided to restart the application to see if things went a bit better.
Trying to search for Sting again the results came up and the artist was even marked with a yellow star. The red X indicates songs that is unavailable for the free edition of the application. When proceeding to download the website url offering this track came up. Now I thought all was well as the download started and suddenly my phone shouted out “System error”. My download was of course corrupted and I had used up one of my free recordings. Trying again with same artist and the track “Desert Rose” I was able to ‘complete’ the download. However when opening it the built in music player complained that the file was corrupted.
Final conclusions
Going through the genres in the application was very smooth and it offered a lot of genres which looks really nice, however loading time as well as corrupted downloads lead to a really bad user experience. Further using my laptop to go through their support forums reveals that there are several plugins out there and I seriously couldn’t figure out if it was for their PC product or this mobile product. Upon further investigation in their forums it also revealed that there were numerous problems with their application such as registration not being completed whereas the application would go back into trial mode and other issues. There is also no way to find the dedicated forum for their mobile product besides the url that popped up once (due to a timeout error). I will praise them for their idea as ringtones and music is still something consumers will buy and offering it for free is of great value, however when it comes in such a bad package I rather crawl on the internet myself for the music than pay for an application that doesn’t do the job too well. For this is basically what this application does, crawling the internet in search of music, record it on your phone to listen to at last.
That said, some of our readers did find this application very good but my experience however was not.
