Pandora for the iPhone, meet Last.fm (Mobilescrobbler)

 UPDATE: In an interesting twist of fate, the last.fm app was launched earlier today in the app store. This iteration is slightly nerfed in that it is missing features such as lyrics, tagging, and background scroblling from the iPod app. Still minus these features, it’s still a very solid app and with it, there is no need for Pandora unless I really need a different option!

When the App Store launched on July 10th, I posted about how already felt i was sacrificing certain apps since they were not readily available in the store, but were available on jailbroken iPhones. Then, I read so many positive reviews for the Pandora app. For streaming music on the iPhone 2.0 official firmware, it’s one of the best choices. But the app itself just allows you to create and play stations. While this feature is terrific, Mobilescrobbler already does that and more. And this last.fm iPhone app was SUPERB on pre 2.0 jailbroken iphones.

I searched for the developer site of that app, what was then called Mobilescrobbler and I found their site. I found on the front page a bulletin that said the very app that I loved so much would be coming to the app store soon! There is also this video posted to show a demo of the app in action.

The jailbroken version of this app did one thing that I’m not sure is going to make it in this iteration and that is the ability to run in the background. Much like the desktop client versions of a last.fm app that would either run in your system tray or menu bar, Mobilescrobbler would leave a nice little icon in your iPhone’s menu bar and always be running. So, when you listened to any music out of the iPod app on your phone, it would send / scrobble that track right over Edge or Wi-Fi in the background. This was a huge addition to the other methods of scrobbling tracks. I think keeping track of all the songs you listen to and sharing them with everyone is an amazing thing, so much so that I really believe you should be able to scrobble from any device or service. With the jailbroken version of this iPhone app, a huge gap was filled in, namely anything I was listening to in the car or just walking around with my headphones on. So I hope they can make that happen.

Furthermore, the amount of features that were available were possibly the most features I’ve seen in an iPhone app period. Tagging, banning, loving, charts, gesture based controls, all friends info, all radio options offered on the website, lyrics, concert venue info for artist. You could actually be listening to a song in the iPod app and minimize it, tap open Mobilescrobbler and it would go out to last.fm and look up the song you were listening to automatically. It would bring up all of that artist’s info including lyrics to the song on the fly.  In a real life scenario recently, I was in Best Buy with a friend and he was telling me about the band Scars on Broadway. He wanted me to know what they sounded like because he couldn’t explain it properly. I opened Mobilescrobbler and typed in Scars on Broadway and their latest single started to stream right then and there. Situations like that are what make these apps so great.

In terms of pitting it against Pandora, it’s similar in that it also is a streaming personal radio service that is generated through what you like based on thumbs upping it in Pandora or loving it in Mobilescrobbler and/or “similar artist” suggestions for both services. Maybe some people think Pandora does a better job at that. But one limitation Pandora has is the “you can only skip a certain amount of songs per hour” much like AOL radio. Somehow, Mobilescobbler and the last.fm service as a whole gets past this, at least for now.

I have been using last.fm and clients that connect to it for the past three years so it’s obviously my music service of choice. I have been able to discover countless amounts of new music through doing so and been able to share, in some ways, “COUNTED” (23,947, to be exact) music tracks with friends and strangers.

When Mobilescrobbler hits the app store, I probably will never load Pandora ever again.