The iTunes Wi-Fi Store is undeniably the biggest upgrade in the iPhone s 1.1.1 software .
The ability to buy music from your phone is quite possibly a killer app for the phone, and one that I ve been looking forward to since its announcement at the iPod event earlier this month. But how does it work? The answer: pretty great.
I ve already browsed and bought from the store, and I ve got to say that the experience is as smooth if not, in some cases, smoother than the iTunes Store experience we ve had for the past four and a half years. For one thing, formatting the store for the iPhone means removing a lot of the extraneous information you get in the full-blown version. Gone are the recommendation lists, the comments, the artist bios.
Instead you merely get the option to browse featured songs and top ten lists. That s great, but the key for the mobile iTunes Store is unquestionably search the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store is all about the impulse buy , and in that, Apple has succeeded. Searching the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store is fast and it s smart .
I didn t have to type more than a few letters to find what I was looking for, and saving me finger taps means I m less likely to be frustrated in my attempt to lay down some money. Once you ve found what you re looking for, it s a snap to preview any track by tapping it. Buying is easy too; just hit the price and it ll turn into a Buy Now link.
Tap that, and you ll be prompted for your iTunes account password. Once you ve entered that, the track or album will be queued for download; you can easily se your queue by hitting the Download button on the bar at the bottom. But there are limitations.
First off, as the title implies, this is the iTunes Wi-Fi Music store. You won t find music videos, movies, TV shows, or sad to say podcasts. This is a little tricky, since some albums include non-music items.
For example, I downloaded the extended version of Motion City Soundtrack s new Even If It Kills Me, which has both a video and a digital booklet. Neither of these items were downloaded to my iPhone, and it took me a while to figure out how to get them on my computer (originally I missed the note on the album page in the Wi-Fi Store that read: If you purchase this album, the next time you connect to the iTunes Store on your computer, you will also receive ). If it doesn t prompt you immediately, you can also go to your account page on your Mac/PC, where you ll see a message about pending downloads.
Hit the button there, and the missing files will be transferred to your computer. Pretty seamless, though I find it silly that I can t download music videos directly, since I ll probably just end up syncing them over later. Furthermore, as again suggested by the name of the game, this is the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store.
Wanna browse and buy over EDGE? Tough luck. You ll see an error telling you that you can only access the store when you re on Wi-Fi.
I d prefer being able to at least browse and bookmark things to download later, but maybe we ll see that in a future update. Also, the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store doesn t handle pre-orders. Mostly, it seems as though albums available for pre-order don t even show up in searching, though the one time I came across a pre-order album, which currently has a single track available (Jimmy Eat World s forthcoming Big Casino), iTunes popped up an error message saying The item you ve requested is not available.
That s little surprise, though: as I said, this is about the impulse buy you probably aren t going to find yourself pre-ordering a lot of songs from your iPhone, though, again, it would be nice if there was some sort of wishlist feature. Other than wanting to see some other types of media available, the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store does pretty much what it says on the tin. It s not likely to provide a substantial chunk of iTunes sales in the near future, but it does open the door to making the consumption of digital media a far more pervasive experience than it s been to date.
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