Hive Player for Honeycomb tablets puts all your music controls in a widget

While there are a number of excellent alternatives to the Android music player for smartphones, the tablet space is a little more barren. Honestly, the default music player for Android 3.x Honeycomb tablets is pretty good — and it includes one killer feature: Support for Google Music Beta, a service that lets you upload songs from your PC to the cloud and stream them to your tablet, phone, or web browser. But a little competition is always a good thing, so it’s nice to see Hive Player: an independent music app designed for Honeycomb tablets.

Hive Player’s coolest feature is probably the powerful home screen widget. You can use it to scroll through your albums, artists, songs, playlists, or genres. You can also control the music player entirely from the widget without ever opening the full app.

Once you do launch the full app though, you’ll notice that it’s optimized for Honeycomb tablets. There’s a two-pane view, with your music list on the left and an information window and playback controls on the right. You can also create playlists withing the app.

Right now Hive Player doesn’t support Google Music Beta streaming, but the developer hopes to add this feature once Google makes an API available.

The full version of Hive Player runs $1.99. There’s also a free version which lacks some features. For instance, you can only browser albums or artists in the home screen widget and there’s no support for adding multiple songs to a playlist.

via Android Central