Pandora Interface

For those of you that are already familiar with Pandora for Blackberry, I’m sure you are aware of how sweet of an application it is! Please skip to part two of this blog for information on the newly released update that you can Download for Pandora as I will be discussing general information on the program in part one for those who are new to Pandora for Blackberry.

PART ONE: If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I wish I could totally and completely personalize the radio and music I listen to”, well good news! Enter Pandora for Blackberry. Pandora is available OTA and allows you to create up to 100 customizable live streaming radio stations right on your phone. On top that you can create one Quick Mix station that allows you to choose as many as you want from your 100 to get a wider variety of music with the touch of one button.(Rather than having to switch back and forth.)

Point your blackberry browser to www.pandora.com to download the app. A bonus: the program will automatically correctly set application permissions for you. After the download is complete you will be asked to set up an account by entering an email address, password, year of birth, gender, and zip code. If you have already created a Pandora account online, your email and password is all you will need.

What makes Pandora an exceptionally awesome application is how customizable it is. Once your account is set up you are ready to begin creating your stations. Just enter the name of your favorite artists or title of your favorite songs, and a station will be created to play music similar to that of which you have entered. There is a “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system that helps you to expand and diversify your stations. Giving a thumbs up rating will generate more songs (by a variety of artists) with similar attributes. Giving a thumbs down will skip the song and correspondingly play less songs with similar attributes. If you negatively rate two songs by the same artist, that artist will be removed completely from your music. (To re-add them you must do it from the web interface @ ww.pandora.com). You do have the option to skip a song without giving it the bad rating by simply clicking the track forward button. You are allowed to skip 12 songs in a 24 period using this method.

All in all Pandora has been a great experience me personally as well as many others. One final tip: when closing out of the application always choose the Shut Down Pandora option. Just closing the application will leave it running in the background causing undesired battery drain.

PART TWO: I am excited to announce that there has recently been and update to Pandora for Blackberry! The program is now streaming in high quality AAC+ format, which for you means, better sounding music. Users will have the option to change between high and normal quality. Depending on the speed of your internet connection your phone may not be able to keep up with the higher quality streaming. Persons using wifi rather than their carriers broadband connection are likely to be the ones to run into this problem. With the update (version 1.1) you will notice auto complete words while typing and you will have the option of enabling or disabling station auto start. Also, the new version is a 30% to 40% smaller download application than previous versions.

Some bug fixes that 1.1 improves include a quieter low sound setting. On the lowest setting the sound gets as quiet as possible before muting, whereas, before the lowest setting was still just too loud. Now album art is displayed for every track, and the update fixes the glitch affecting some Storms where there was an issue with seamless playback after a service alert, ie: a phone call or incoming message.

If you haven’t already, download this upgrade! It makes an already great application even better!