Recently I’ve decided to reconsider the HTC HD 2 given that I got rather frustrated with the touch keyboard and the lack of applications that actually use the landscape mode. I’ve developed patience for the keyboard and am managing to start liking the phone.

The next big hurdle is Spotify. I have a Spotify premium account for two reasons. First, I hate ads and in particular I hate being bombarded with the same ads over and over and over .. etc and second I like to listen to music on the way to work so Spotify on my Nokia E71 is a win.

I was horrified to notice that Spotify have overlooked the Windows Mobile platform and are seemingly reluctant to develop for it. There is however, a workaround called mySpot. So last night I decided to give it a try.

You can find mySpot over at the xda-developer forum. You will need to register to download the .cab file.

Now mySpot lacks internal playback and only handles the listing and searching capabilities of Spotify’s library, so you will need to download a media player that can handle Ogg Vorbis streams. You have two recommended choices; GSPlayer and Pocket Player (currently at version 4 and requires you to purchase it after 30 days trial) and considering that I’ve already splashed out for the premium Spotify experience, I opted for the free GSPlayer.

Installation is very simple, tap the cab files for both programs (player first) and it’s done, no fuss.

Now firing up mySpot, the interface is nice to use and easy to get around using your fingers, but it doesn’t automatically ask you for Spotify credentials on first use which I thought was a bit silly as using this service requires a premium account in the first place.

Personally, over the wireless network , I found the searching and streaming of play lists absolutely appalling and would be frequently met with the “Service Unavailable” message whislt trying to open my own play lists or opening something from the search results. Just to make sure, my play lists are at most 15-20 tracks long and on the forum it is claimed that this should not be a problem.

Next, when I finally managed to get a list or track to stream GSPlayer pops right up into the foreground! This can be dismissed by tapping the ‘x’ and it will happily play in the background, but still this is irritating. The user interface on GSPlayer is rather appalling and trying to select a track on the play list with your finger is almost impossible. You get what you pay for I suppose. Still I was not amused that pausing or skipping tracks resulted in the stream to stop working. So, a trip back to mySpot and try several times to load the play list again and eventually it will play again. Skip a track, problem resumes.

I found this experience incredibly tedious and to be honest, if the service is unreliable on a wireless network I can’t imagine the pain I’d have to go through on a train to and from work considering that there is no off-line play list feature either. So I will not be using mySpot in the future and all I can do now is pray Spotify remove the digit from the rectum and actually code for Windows Mobile, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Oh and I do have Spotify invitations to give out for the free version (with ads) if anyone wants one.