Where MusicStation is good, it’s very good. Where it’s bad, it’s merely a bit irritating.

The fact that you can easily search for new tracks, artists and albums on your music player is great.

Downloading over 3G or HSDPA is just about fast enough to listen to track 1 while track 2 is downloading.

The community features are great – seeing the latest music news and downloading the artist’s music at the same time is a great idea. You can share your playlists with your friends and the wider community.

Music qualty is fine, sounds as good as the iPod – your phone and headphones not withstanding

The bad…
The usability isn’t as good as the iPod. It works well, but it’s not quite as fluid.

No gapless playback… Grrr…

You can only play tracks you’ve downloaded from MusicStation. While their catalogue is very extensive, it doesn’t have The Beatles – nor will it let you download profane songs (I think).

Being a software app, it has occaisional bugs and doesn’t always integrate well with the phone’s native features (volume control is done in the app, not the N95’s hard keys, for example).

DRM. I’m against DRM. It’s evil. BUT, this is a rental model. For the price of 1 album (£8) you get to listen to every album in the world for a month. Without the DRM, you could download every album and quit paying at the end of the month.

Overall, I set it downloading a couple of albums and listen to them when commuting. I’m broadly happy with it as a consumer.

These are my own opions, not Vodafone’s. I’m typing this on my Blackberry, so please excuse any typos.