NOW JB Hi-Fi has a serious music competitor

Today seen the launch of the long awaited mobile apps for JB Hi-Fi’s NOW music subscription service. With mobile such an important element to music consumption, this really was a glaring omission at launch. So now NOW has an offering for smartphones, the question is, is it better than the competition?

The JB Hi-Fi mobile app is available on iOS and Android with plans for, but no release on Windows Phone. With so much competition, NOW has to not just match, but better the feature set of others music apps. With pricing and catalogues between the services being similar, it’s with features that a service can differentiate and steal customers.

The JB Hi-Fi app is actually refreshingly good. While all the standard searching features are there, it’s the music discovery and mixtape sections that set it apart from the rest. You can try out the NOW apps with a 1 month free trial, this even works if you burnt through your launch trial.

		JB Hi-Fi NOW Mobile Apps VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

While some competitors have significant differences between the platforms, the NOW app is basically identical in functionality. This means users of either Android or iOS shouldn’t feel like they got the ported app, good job devs, lets hope the Windows Phone version is equally equipped.

Now for the downsides. While its great to have access to the Tracks and Album charts, there are no sub-categories or genres in the chart sections. On both the iOS app and the Android app, I experienced the occasional crash. So far this hasn’t been a repeatable issue.

Music streaming is available over 3G and syncing of playlists can also be opted in to, but understandably is disabled by default. The apps are free and available now from the App Store on iOS and Android Play (Market was a better name).

More info @ JB Hi-Fi