Hands-On: Netflix for Android Available Now for Select Smart Phones

When it comes to mobile Netflix streaming, Android users have long been locked out of a theater already filled with happy iPhone, iPad, and even Windows Phone 7 watchers.

That changed today when Netflix announced a free Android app that would grant owners of  HTC Android phones such as the Evo 4G, G2, Incredible, and Nexus One—as well as another phone, the  Samsung Nexus S—the ability to stream movies and television shows. According to Netflix, an app should be available in the Android Market of each smart phone now.

We didn’t see the app in the Market on the Evo 4G, but we had no problem signing into the web-based version of the Android Market with our Gmail password and selecting the app for download there. It was pushed to the Evo 4G almost instantaneously, and, in about 2 minutes, we were browsing our Netflix queue and resuming content that we watched on a home computer just last night.

To celebrate the occasion, we decided to go hands-on with the service. (Just so you know, it looked great on our handset and streamed with few delays.) Keep reading for more details.

Below you’ll see that the Netflix app is laid out with four tabs: Home, Genres, Search, and Queue. It’s nice that previously viewed content is waiting to be resumed as soon as you log in.

Using the Sprint HTC Evo’s 4G data connection, we streamed the movie The Golden Child with little to no wait or lag time.  For a video shown on a smart phone display, this movie looked great and it streamed, and after about 10 minutes, we still didn’t notice a single buffering pause. We even used the place jogger to jump from scene to scene and encountered buffering times of only a few seconds, if that. New users are going to have fun with this app.

The Netflix app works over 3G too. Once video got started, we didn’t see any lengthy pauses using 3G. However, it did take the app about 45 seconds to load and another 10 seconds to start playback. Still, for the pleasure of watching any video in your queue or in Netflix’s Watch Instantly library, that’s not too bad.

As it stands, the Netflix app only works for the above-mentioned phones. On its website, Netflix explains that rolling out the app to more smart phones is challenging because of  ”the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones”.  Still, the company has said it is hand-testing more devices, so hopefully the app will land soon for those of you without a requisite phone.

Check out more screenshots below!