Having my cake and eating Apple: Music withme review

I make little secret that I'm not keen on Apple. I find their business approach a bit too controlled, a bit too "you can only play with your toys this way, we can't trust you not to break it".

I like breaking things, it's the best way to make new things. And so the more laissez-faire approach of the google-android side of the internet is a natural home for me. Whilst it is still controlled to a degree, it's more open to people questioning things like "why do I need to use iTunes to put music on my phone?"

Unfortunately for me, I wasn't always so much a disciple of the Cult of the Droid. I have songs on an iTunes account which for one reason or another, I'm having difficulty sourcing on CD or MP3. So they're in limbo, as my iPod touch (long story) broke a year and a week after purchase and I despair of iTunes as a media player.

Whereas on my Android phone I have 2 brilliant music players - ³ (aka cubed) and Spotify. But it narked me having purchased (sorry, contracted as a licensee or whatever the legal term is, I certainly don't own the music) these with gift-vouchers aplenty, I couldn't get my ears on them.

Until today. Today I started using an application named Music WithMe. Unfortunately it's the most clunkiest android application I've ever used, but bearing in mind it has to get around Apple protectionism, I can forgive it that.

Musicwithme requires the Android app first, then a Windows plugin which does something(not sure what) to upload data via Facebook to it's servers. If the service wasn't recommended to me by a Very Trusted Source, I'd be worried. In fact, I was still worried; so I created a fictious facebook account just to handle this process. It wasn't clear or intuitive how to put these details in - but eventually I worked it out. Well it didn't, but that was because the service was lagging without any indication that it was, but eventually it worked.

Add to the klunkiness that musicwithme application is an incredibly basic song player. It plays a song - that's it. It won't play many songs, just the one song you select. That's it.

But it does work. I can now sync every song on my purchased playlist wirelessly and for free to my android phone. So I am very happy bunny.

Of course 12 hours later, Google announced they were releasing an app (alas not to us outside the US) that does exactly the same - so it's probably worth holding out for their offer. But never mind that now, because on my android device, I can listen to my Tunes, having finally dropped the ubiquitious i.