Samsung Music Hub - First Look

To coincide with the Galaxy SIII going on sale, Samsung has re-launched its Music Hub - a cloud-based locker, radio and music store. It's similar to Apple's iCloud and iTunes, because it lets you store songs in the cloud and stream them to your phone, smart TV, PC or Mac.

Music Hub is free and comes with an impressive 100GB of online storage, compared to the 5GB and 25,000-song limit of Apple iCloud. It uses 7digital's music library and lets you preview and buy tracks from the Hub's built-in store. Helpfully, once you download a track, it now automatically syncs with your other connected Samsung devices. If you use 7digital, you won't have to pay twice for tracks, because previous purchases can also be synced. You can't stream songs with the free version, but they can be downloaded and played offline.

If you want unlimited streaming, you'll need to pay £9.99 a month for the new premium service. This seems steep, but it's the same price as Spotify Premium, which offers a very similar service. It’s also the first time that Samsung and 7digital has offered streaming. If you've got a Samsung Galaxy SIII, you can use the service straight away. More Samsung phones and TVs are due to get it soon, and an iOS version is also in development.

Samsung's Music Hub has taken some of the best features from existing services, and put them into a neat, relatively cheap package. It doesn't offer anything new; it just puts everything in one place. Unfortunately, because it's tied to specific handset s, only a select few can make full use of all these features at the moment. The free version doesn't offer much more than 7digital, either, so until the Music Hub is more widely available, it's hard to get too excited about the service.