We love the Zune’s stylish, flashy and efficient music player user interface which, by not simple luck, has been inherited by Windows Phone 7. Official Zune development might or might not have stopped, nevertheless it’s created something bigger and also quite a following. So, when we found out that it’s been ported into an Android music player we were pretty excited.
The application comes from LauncherPro’s developer, and although it’s still quite an early alpha build, we’ve taken it through its paces and its pretty smooth and really close both functionally and visually to the original.
UPDATE 1: Zune/WP7 styled music player shown running on Nook Color, images after the link.
UPDATE 2: Alpha 3 just released with many bug fixes and new features, link for download after the break.
UPDATE 3: Alpha 4 now out with widget support and playlist creation, link for download after the break.
You get the typical categories: music, albums, songs, playlists and genres, in the same Zune/WP7 typographical style. You can swipe to side scroll between the categories, jump alphabetically and the app even downloads artists’ images for the now playing song and displays them as a background. We did run into an occasional bug and forced closures but otherwise it’s quite functional, despite its alpha status.
We doubt this will land on the Android Market anytime soon, so if you want to try it for yourself, hit the download link below. From the page click to download the application apk file onto your computer. Now transfer the file via USB to your device. Make sure you have checked ‘Unknown sources’ under Settings > Application settings on you Android device. Now use a file browsing app, like Astro File Manager, to open the file and install the app–no root required.
[Download link, twitter@fedecarnales]UPDATE 1: We’ve installed the app on a Nook Color and it’s just lovely running on the bigger screen. Screenshots below:
UPDATE 2: Alpha 3 can be downloaded from here, adding a provisional icon, better navigation, ability to add song to playing queue and more.
