I hate admitting I'm wrong. I'll do almost anything to avoid it. I'll go to extreme lengths to prove my point and I'll argue it to the death. I may even fake evidence if absolutely necessary. I was 3rd speaker on my debating team at school. I didn't even need to believe the argument, I was literally disagreeing for the sake of it.
However, when it comes to enjoying music on my Samsung Galaxy SIII, and this hurts me to write more than I can say, I was wrong. So wrong. Way wrong. Wrongiddy wrong wrong the wronging wrong.
And it's all because of Google Play Music.
Last time I wrote about music on smartphones, I was struggling to sync things onto my S3 from my iTunes playlists. I may have been a bit hasty. Since then, I've persisted, primarily because of the other features of the phone. I gave up trying to sync things with Kies, an application that tries to work either via USB or Wifi, but just took forever if it worked at all.
In fact, once I uninstalled Kies, everything functioned a lot better. I now keep the playlists I want up to date on my handset using Easy Phone Sync, a more stripped down program, but it works and it works quickly.
What's more important is now if I'm in Wifi range, it literally no longer matters if I have any music saved on my phone at all. Thanks to Google Play Music, I can access my entire music collection through my phone.
I'm not sure what Apple are trying to do with the iTunes Radio service they revealed last week, but they're probably trying to replicate what Google has been doing for a while, the difference being, you can access Google Play Music from a variety of devices.
Using the Google Play Music Manager on your PC, you can upload as many as 20,000 songs from your iTunes library - playlists, podcasts and all. They are then available from anywhere, all you have to do is log in.
I've found the streaming to be amazingly stable, probably due to the way the Play Music app caches songs in advance. You can even download songs and playlists to your phone on the go.
In short, finally, I have the ability to access my entire music collection in a way I've never been able to before, even when it was just a stack of CD's under the coffee table. The chances of me fossicking through over 1000 albums just because I felt like listening to one particular song would be about zero. Now I can search for it on my phone just as easily as I can using iTunes on my PC.
This is what I've been waiting for since I spent a stupid amount of time digitising my collection. Now, at last, I can finally LISTEN to it.
Oh dear, what a sellout I turned out to be. It seems like all I want to talk about lately is Samsung this and Samsung that. If it's not the innovative features of the Galaxy S4, it's the all round usefulness of the Note 8.0.
And now I've seen Samsung's dongle, there's no turning back...
Yes, today I bring you something from the You-Never-Knew-It-Existed-But-Now-You-Do-You-Must-Have-It-Immediately Department; the Samsung AllShare Cast Wireless Hub.
To be fair, it is a silly name for it. If I was naming it, I'd call it something a bit more straight forward, like PhoneOnTelly, because that's exactly what it does.
My relationship with my Galaxy SIII was not love at first sight. In fact, when I first tried to use it, I only lasted a week before I was scared off by how fiddly it was to set up. But eventually I went back to it, lured by Android's promise of a wider app selection.
It's actually a bit like my relationship with the Domestic Manager - we couldn't really stand each other when we first met, but over time we grew to love each other and 20 years on, we've really started to take each other for granted. Same deal with my trusty S3; after I spent a bit of time and effort getting to know it properly, we reached a mutual understanding and now I use it for things I never expected to.
Initially, I said mean things about playing music on it, for example. Now, after discovering Google's Play Music app, my listening habits are all Samsung based, but more on that next week.
Not only am I now listening, I'm watching too. Unlike Windows and Apple phones, the Samsung's default browser doesn't even blink when asked to stream video. In fact, I even watched yesterday's Warriors game on my phone. Weirdly, this actually wasn't terrible.
The screen on the S3 is big, the S4's is bigger still but obviously, the game would have been even better on my TV, and what all Samsung phone or tablet users need to know, not only is this possible, it's easy.
I guess the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub is effectively Samsung's answer to Apple TV, except, instead of using it to stream stuff from your computer, you do it straight from your handset. (And by computer, I mean a Mac - I've heard "inconclusive reports" from people who've attempted to use Apple TV with their PC)
These days, Samsung makes a pretty impressive Smart TV, and this may be why I haven't seen any marketing for the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub, because it effectively turns ANY HD telly into a Smart TV, as long as you've got a spare HDMI socket to plug it into.
Amazingly, that's about all the setup required. You plug the tiny box in, push the AllShare button on your phone and you're good to go. Photos, music, video all played in crystal clarity on the big screen. Even if you're just browsing, you can now do it on your TV, just like one of those flash new ones you can't really justify buying.
It really is that simple - there's not even an on/off switch, just a reset button if you want to swap feeds between phones or tablets. Updates over the weekend have incorporated all this into the Samsung Link system, which gives you access to any multimedia content stored on any of your devices.
You can use the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub in conjunction with the Galaxy S3 and S4, the as well as the Galaxy Note II, 8.0 and 10.1.
What this all means is at last, after years of trying, is I can now use my phone to play anything on my computer through my TV. And that makes me a very happy boy.
