Last.fm for iPhone Launches, Rocks.

Pete Mortensen ()

Last.fm iPhone Demo from Toby on Vimeo.

I was rather effusive in my enthusiasm for the launch of intelligent music radio application Pandora on iPhone. It symbolized, more than anything, that Apple was perfectly willing to let people listen to music on the device without the company’s blessing — some of the time anyway.

Tonight, Last.fm launched its own iPhone app, and it’s a doozy. The video demo speaks for itself, but I’m quite impressed with the events integration and the detailed information. I’ve been a bigger fan of Last.fm than Pandora for some time, not least for the huge amount of information on bands that it has to offer. Additionally, the social networking features are very cool — being able to e-mail any track to a contact? Genius. It’s available through the App Store now.

Sadly, it won’t Scrobble the tracks you listen to in the main iPod application, except after a sync with iTunes, nor will it keep playing while you browse on Safari, but those are technical impediments on Apple’s part. Altogether, it’s an impressive effort. With Pandora and AOL Radio, it has officially made the iPhone superior in every way to a satellite radio — unless you care about Howard Stern. This is the true future of radio, and it’s finally on the right platform.

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About the author

Petemortensen

Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

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Posted in iPhone, Software |

  • Bora Okumusoglu

    real must-have for a better `iPod` experience :)

  • http://musyne.livejournal.com/ musyne

    Seems nice.. just “seems”, however, it crash all the time on my iPod Touch.

  • Josh

    Why would you think that Howard (Hoo hoo) Stern would be the only reason for owning satellite radio?

  • Church of Apple

    Pandora vs. Last.fm

    Who wins?

  • Hypersky75

    “Sadly, it won’t Scrobble the tracks you listen to in the main iPod application…”

    Sadly, that’s the only thing I would’ve used it for… :(

  • http://www.danielbachhuber.com/ Daniel Bachhuber

    I think it’s really unfortunate that the coolest part of MobileScrobbler, the scrobbling, was cut. At this point, I’m seriously debating whether to downgrade in order to have that functionality back. Any news on whether it will come back? Where do we place our violent dissent?

  • Max Howell

    We can’t scrobble in realtime, since it is impossible to run background applications.

    As always you can scrobble with Last.fm Desktop.

    Max Howell
    Last.fm