Play.me for Android

Play.me offers an online music subscription service akin to that of Rhapsody. For $10 per month, you gain access to a 10.5-million-song catalog available at your fingertips for immediate streaming or downloading. The Web-based interface is a breeze to use and offers some handy features, so we were excited to check out the service's mobile app for Android.

The app itself is a free download, which is as it should be for anything that's already relieving you of a monthly fee. Getting Play.me through either the Market or a direct path entered into the browser on your device is a simple and relatively quick process. An icon pops up alongside any other apps you already have installed.

Upon first opening Play.me, you'll be prompted to either sign up for an account or enter your pre-existing information. The main menu offers tabs for accessing featured content, saved playlists, and account information. You can also easily search for artists, albums, and tracks. However, once you find what you're looking for, there's no way to easily add it to the playback queue or a playlist; rather, you have to start playing the song and then the playback screen has an add or download option. This is a bit of a bother compared with the Web app. (To view the interface in depth, check out our Play.me gallery.)

Although navigating the Play.me Android app is quite straightforward, it doesn't offer the snappiest response we've experienced. There were noticeable lags when adding songs to playlists, and a few times, this feature failed altogether. Sometimes, our input wasn't registered for other features either, and the app crashed entirely during testing--twice. So though the Play.me app is a nice option for subscribers, it doesn't appear to be entirely stable at this time.