This free Android control software for Sonos wireless multi-room music systems includes unique features that aren’t available on the iPhone version.
If you’re not familiar with Sonos S5 wireless speakers, you can place them in any room in your house, or pair two of them together. They use Wi-Fi to tap into your network and find all of your digital music for instant playback, and can also play almost any Internet music service.
You can control Sonos wireless speakers ($400 apiece) from a Mac or PC, but it’s a lot easier to use an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android phone to do the controlling. The iPhone/Touch and iPad apps for Sonos has been available for months, but until this Android app is released next month, the only choices for Android have been third-party apps that in my opinion are sluggish and don’t work as well as the Sonos control app I’ve been using on iPhone.
I’m hoping the Android version will match the quality of the iOS versions. Sonos reps told me today the Android version will be better, able to do some things the iOS version can’t. For instance, the physical volume controls on Android phones will be capable of raising and lowering the volume of the Sonos speakers, which must be done using the touchscreen on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
Another unique feature of this Android version is speech recognition, where in addition to typing the name of the song, you can speak the name of the tune you’re looking for. Sonos and said this works when the music is playing loudly, which I’d like to verify with my own testing. This could be a significant convenience over the iPhone version, which can be cumbersome if you want to find a single track in a large collection.
Mashable‘s Brenna Ehrlich used Sonos’s multi-room system, controlled with iOS devices, recently in a demo of music subscription service Rdio. You can view some of the Android app screenshots and products stills in the gallery below.
No comments:
Post a Comment