The latest mobile music service to try to take Rhapsody's crown, MOG for Android has a slick-looking style, connects to a catalog of nearly nine million songs, and offers the user unlimited high-quality downloads. But several bugs need to be worked out before MOG can really become a top-tier music app that's worth having a $9.99-a-month subscription.
I tested the MOG Android app on the Samsung Vibrant ($199.99-499.99, ) running Android 2.1 and the HTC EVO 4G ($299.99, ) running Android 2.2. MOG works on Android phones running OS version 1.5 and above, but the service has sound quality problems on phones running Android 2.2. MOG offers a free 3-day trial and can be found in the Android Market.
Interface, Library, and Sound QualityMOG's home screen has six large, self-explanatory icons: Search, New Releases, MOG Charts, Today's Picks, My Favorites, and My Downloads. Under the six icons is a slender bar that says Play Queue. You probably won't spend much time on the home screen because there isn't an obvious way back to it unless you tap the physical "back" button several times on your Android phone.
Elsewhere in MOG, you have a small black control bar at the bottom of the screen that lets you play, pause, go back a track, go forward a track, go back a screen, or toggle radio mode. The radio option, once turned on, can help you discover new artists that are similar to the artist you currently listening to. I found the suggestions for "similar artists" to be fairly accurate. For Eminem, the app suggested songs from Brother Ali, G-Unit, D12, 50 Cent, and other rap artists.
You'll spend a lot of time on the Play Queue screen, where you can see any songs you've listened to recently. If you hold down on a particular song, you get the option to remove the song from the queue, clear all songs, download that song, or buy the song. Tapping the Buy option takes you to an Amazon.com Web page. Annoyingly, MOG automatically restarts your queue when it runs out of songs. There is no way to turn off that kind of wrapping around.
The Android app streams music at 64 kbps in AAC+ format. You also have the option to download unlimited low-quality AAC+ tracks at 64 kbps or high-quality MP3 tracks at 256 or 320 kbps to the phone's microSD card. If you plan to use MOG on your PC or Mac as well, MOG's desktop site offers high-quality 256 or 320 kbps MP3 streams, with the quality depending on what the label has approved. That's higher quality music than Rhapsody offers on the desktop, so that may make MOG worth the $9.99 to some people.
Froyo Issues, Bugs, and ConclusionsIf you are using Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo), you should stay away from MOG for now. A rep from MOG says Froyo has a bug that degrades AAC+ playback. I tested it on the EVO 4G, and I definitely could tell the sound quality was worse than listening on the Vibrant running 2.1. MOG says they are working on this issue with Google.
I ran into several other annoying bugs. Sometimes I would download a song in high quality and the song would refuse to play, even though it had appeared in My Downloads. Sometimes the app would crash without any real reason, and occasionally I needed to kill the app manually because it would freeze up.
MOG's search feature is imprecise and impractical, often hiding the most popular artist very late in results. Looking for a popular indie band called Stars, I couldn't find them in the artist results at all, but many other small acts with the word Stars in their names appeared. Let's go more popular: If you search for the rapper B.o.B., who has two songs on the Billboard 100 right now, he does not appear in artist results—at all. To find B.o.B., I had to search by albums and go pretty deep into the collection before I found him.
Users of MOG's high-quality desktop app who want to listen to a bit of music on their Android devices will enjoy this app, but it doesn't come up to the standard set by Rhapsody ($9.99/month, ), our Editors' Choice for mobile music services. If you're looking for a music app that doesn't require a subscription, both Pandora (Free, ) and Slacker give you great radio options that sound good and look sharp.
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