When AOL introduced Winamp 1.0 for Android a few months ago one of the main selling points for the music player was the fact that you could stream or download free songs from Spinner using the app. This week Winamp 1.1 hit the Android Market, and it brings even more free music. You can listen to full length CDs from AOL’s Full CD Listening Party site.

Unfortunately the Party is online only. You can stream music but you won’t be able to download tracks.

There are currently 25 full length albums including music from Sam Phillips, Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Dean Martin, and Simply Red. Every week the list of albums will change.

Other changes in Winamp 1.1 for Android include support for additional languages and SHOUTcast support for Android 2.1. Previously the internet radio streaming service only supported Android 2.2 and up.

Winamp also has a number of features which help set it apart from the default Android Music player including the ability to synchronize your music with the desktop version of Winamp over a wireless network and support for Last.fm scrobbling.

Winamp 1.1 is available as a free download from the Android Market.

The developers behind the classic Winamp media player for Windows have launched a beta version of the app for Google Android. Sure, it doesn’t support video, have an equalizer, visualizations, or many of the other features that make the desktop version stand out, but Winamp for Android is a light weight mobile app which provides a nice interface for playing music on your mobile device — plus it supports scrobbling from Last.fm, has an very nice home screen widget.

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Oh yeah, it also has one killer feature: you can manage your music collection using the desktop version of Winamp and also transfer songs from your desktop player to your phone using a WiFi connection.

In order to synchronize your music, you’ll need to have Winamp 5.59 beta installed on your PC.

Even if you don’t want to sync your music collection, Winamp is worth checking out as an alternative to the default Android music app simply for the attractive user interface and home screen widget. I particularly like how there’s a bar at the bottom of the screen which always shows you the name of the song that’s currently playing, no matter which screen you’re on.

You can swipe this bar up to go to the Now Playing window, much as you would swipe the Android notification bar down to see status messages. I’m a sucker for developers who take time to understand the user interface of the mobile OS they’re developing for.

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AOL has launched two new apps for Android. The first is simply called AOL, and it’s basically a portal to some of AOL’s mobile web sites as well as download links for other AOL apps including the mobile Engadget app and the AOL Lifestream app which is actually a pretty decent tool for keeping track of Facebook, Twitter, and other social network streams.

The News portion of the AOL app is probably the most useful, if you’re looking for general interest news. The ability to change the background is probably the least useful, since you basically get to change the color or shape of those splotches in the top left and bottom right corners. That’s it.

The AOL DailyFinance app, on the other hand, is actually pretty awesome. It offers far more functionality than the Google Finance app which is also available as a free download from the Android Market. the home screen shows you an overview of US and global markets. You can also see a list of the day’s movers, see the latest headlines from DailyFinance.com, and login to see your portfolio watchlist if you have an AOL account — although you don’t need one to use the rest of the app’s features.

The final tab is labeled “get quotes,” and it lets you look up information by a company or fund name or stock symbol. When you click on the results you can see the latest prices, how much the stock went up or down that day, as well as a ton of other information. You can also click the news tab to see recent stories related to that item, or the chart tab to plot it’s progress on a… well, chart.

AOL’s Lifestream is a service that lets you track activity from a number of social networks all from one place. You can link your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Foursquare, Digg, Delicious, and AOL accounts to Lifestream and track the latest updates from your contacts or update your status on one or more of those services from a central location.

In other words, Lifestream is a lot like Friendfeed. Except it’s run by AOL, not Facebook. And so you can login with an AOL Instant Messenger account and see your AOL contacts status messages (which is sort of an awkward social networking feature, because you can reply to their status/away messages from Lifestream, but you can’t initiate a chat).

Lifestream started out its life… stream, as a web site. But today AOL launched an Android application, with an iPhone app expected soon. Actually, the Lifestream web site says the iPhone app is available now, but the download link wasn’t working for me.

The Android version of Lifestream offers most of the features found on the web site. You can see the latest updates from your contacts, update your status, or search for messages from people who aren’t in your contact list.

There’s also a “Discover” tab in the Android app, that you can use to search or browse your favorite messages or view trending topics. These trends show up in the sidebar of the Lifestream web site, but in order to save space in the mobile app, they’ve been moved to a different window.

You can see a few more screenshots after the break.

Lifestream for Android is available from the Android Market. The iPhone app should be available from the iTunes App Store soon.

via TechCrunch

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