All Sections

7digital Android 4.0: Tap to share playlists with NFC and Android Beam

7digital has updated its Android app so that it now works on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich devices as well as letting you share playlists by tapping two phones together.

The new 7digital app makes good use of Android Beam, Google’s NFC tap-to-share platform that lets you share links and YouTube videos as shown off on Google’s recent TV advert.

Tapping two NFC-enabled phones will let you share a playlist with a friend that has the 7digital app installed. Playlists will consist of 30 second previews of songs, or the full songs, if the other person already has the tracks on their phone. If you hear anything you like, you can simply tap a couple of links within the 7digital app and you’ve bought the songs.

While this isn’t quite the mobile phone version of the humble mixtape, it is a cool way for friends to share tracks and discover new music.

7digital Windows Phone 7 app completed, coming soon to Marketplace

7digital has updated its iOS app to support iOS 5.0 and above, improving performance and the overall experience. 7digital has also completed work on its Windows Phone app and has told us that we should see it in the Marketplace soon.

“We’re seeing great momentum on mobile devices and updating our existing apps, and launching on the Windows Phone platform, will ensure this continues.

“With Google buying Motorola and Amazon focused on the Kindle Fire device, we’re the only truly agnostic, independent and cross-platform music download service that allows music lovers to purchase music and access their entire collection on all their devices without being locked to one platform.”

Given 7digital’s platform agnostic nature, we can see NFC based tap-to-share features being rolled out to other platforms with NFC chips. Most of the current BlackBerry range of phones have NFC chips in them and there’s already a 7digital BlackBerry app.

The iPhone 5 (or ‘the new iPhone’ – hopefully it won’t be called that) is also rumoured to feature an NFC chip, though this isn’t confirmed.

As more and more phones with NFC hit the shelves, we can see services like this letting people with iPhones, HTC, Samsung and BlackBerry phones all tapping to share playlists and songs.

7digital now has over 2 million active users on mobile devices, with over 800,000 installs of the Android app alone. 7digital has apps for Android, BlackBerry and iOS platforms and an HTML5-based mobile store.

Aside from using your phone to buy stuff and to find out if those Nike trainers are genuine, we think that sharing music is going to be the biggest driver of NFC. We’ve seen DoubleTwist do something similar with two Samsung Nexus S’s – we’re stoked to see 7digital making good use of emerging tech too.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *