3 (cubed) Android App Review
3 (Cubed) puts an interesting (3D) spin on the music player experience, to say the least. The app is a music player with unique 3D modes of browsing by using your album cover art. Today I’ll be reviewing the app on Android 1.5 running on an MID which uses the Rockchip RK2808 chip. Let’s get started.
The skinny is that this app could replace your standard music player app. It offers all the standard features, including playlists, shuffle functionality and searching for tracks or artists. But what this app has over any standard music player app is that it is fun to use, looks cool and generally puts a nice twist on browsing for songs, one that is welcome in my books. It’s a cool app – I’d use it everyday.
Of note is that the app has the ability to grab album art for you if you are missing any. Definitely handy and convenient. Requires a WiFi connection, understandably.
The app’s main function is to spice up how your music is displayed. There are in total four viewing modes: 3 (Cubed); Wall; Boring; Morph Flow. Let’s take a look at them.
3 (cubed)
The Skinny
The 3 (cubed) viewing mode is evidently the flagship feature, as it were, and you’ve probably figured it out by now. The album art of your music is pasted onto the surface of a 3D cube interface. You spin the cube either horizontally to browse artists alphabetically, or you spin the cube vertically to browse through all your albums which are sorted alphabetically. Spinning the cube is as easy as a swipe of your finger on a touchscreen. If you’re wondering how to play individual songs within each album, rather than playing the entire album, that’s as easy as double tapping on an album cover, and a list pops up of all songs contained in that album. Sorting by album or artist makes little difference to this particular interface. It is definitely cool and functional.
Of Note
One thing is particularly cool: when you are listening to a song and just spinning your album art cube mindlessly – or if you’re actually searching for something else you might like to play but can’t decide which – if you don’t select a new album to start playing, the cube will gradually spin back to your album that reminds one of winding up a rubber band and then watching it unwind at its own elastic pace. Something I enjoyed very much.
Wall
The Skinny
The Wall viewing mode is fairly simple – your album art is just pasted onto a scrollable wall. Not much else to say, other than it looks nice, like some kind of mishmash mural of alphabetically sorted album covers. When you are playing an album, that album remains centered vertically on the wall. If you browse away but select nothing, the wall will scroll quickly back to your album.
Of Note
Double tapping on an album to select an individual song zooms into the album until that album cover takes up the entire screen. Cool.
Boring
The Skinny
The Boring viewing mode is not really all that boring, it’s just standard. It’s all text-only. Curiously on our device the text was cut off at the far left, so that only 2/3 of the first letter was visible. Not sure if it was a design decision or just a bug, but it was a slight annoyance. Sorting by artist or album here immediately switches up the list and can be quite useful for isolating a single song quickly.
Of Note
When selecting an album or artist, before the menu comes up for you to select which song to play or to play/queue all, the remaining text fades away while pivoting right on a 3D diagonal. Could look at that all day.
Morph Flow
The Skinny
The Morph Flow viewing mode is just like an album flip. Flips album covers vertically. It’s cool – I like it – and kinetic scrolling works to some degree which is useful.
Of Note
Nothing much, really. Just a standard 3D album flip – if one could call that standard (?).
Other Features
There is Theme option which can alter your album images to three presets: Normal, Half tone and Earthquake. Half tone makes it black and white and pixelated. Earthquake makes it a jumbled blurry mess. Not recommended.
The preferences menu allows you to customize several options, such as moving the song controls to the bottom or top. Useful stuff.
Note #1: On our 7-inch MID device, the app only worked properly in portrait mode. When switched to landscape the app still functions, but the look is incorrect. Presumably this is because it was designed for phones which tend to have portrait displays (greater height than width).
Note #2: On our RK2808 MID, the cube and morph flow viewing modes were largely hassle free as long as music wasn’t playing. When music was playing, the spinning of the cube became noticeably slower and choppier, as did the flow of the album covers in morph flow mode. Wall mode was fairly choppy anyway, and with music playing that just made it worse. Boring mode was not choppy.
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Categories: Android Tablet, App Review, Review, Tablet
