Online music streaming service Pandora launched a major update today. First, you can now listen to as much music as you want for free. There used to be a 40 hour per month cap on the ad-supported service. Second, the Pandora website has received an HTML5 makeover. It’s much faster and more attractive than the old Flash-based user interface.
The new website also happens to look great on the HP TouchPad tablet. While Pandora offers mobile apps for Android, iOS, and webOS so you can stream music without firing up your web browser, there’s no app available yet for webOS tablets. Since HP has discontinued the TouchPad there’s no guarantee Pandora (or many other companies) will bother to make tablet-friendly webOS apps, but the new website is the next best thing.
The new HTML5 user interface features nice big buttons at the top of the screen for play/pause and skip functions. There are also buttons to give a song a thumbs up or down. Pandora uses that data to help tailor the internet radio stream to your personal tastes.
You can also see lyrics and artist info for each song as it plays. You can view your profile information with a single tap, or start a new station by entering the name of an artist, composer, or song.
Since webOS has full multitasking capabilities, you can fire up Pandora in a web browser, start listening to music, and keep it going in the background while you switch to other apps.
But the most important thing for TouchPad users is that you get an app, albeit a web app, which fills your whole screen, unlike the native webOS app.
the luna app will let you run this in exibition mode. awesome 🙂
luna
You’re right, the new site looks great on my TouchPad, the problem is all the bloody ads. I get almost none on the old pre app, and get them every couple of songs on the website.Â
As for looking good, the app is almost always running in the background while you’re doing other things anyway.
Also the old pre app has a great notification icon on the top of the screen to pause, tell you what song is playing, and give thumbs up & down.
So after playing with the new site for an hour or so, I’m back to the old app.
keep rubbing it in liliputing