Whilst the iPhone is a great smartphone it does lack one important ingredient and that’s an FM Radio. Something that we would hopefully expect to see in future firmware updates. However until then you could check out Synsion Radio Technologies 'TuneIn Radio' app which is a cool piece of software that allows you to listen to and record from over 30,000 internet radio stations.
However the £1.19 price tag gets you a lot more than just an app to record radio stations, as we found out during testing…….
Interface
Upon start-up you are greeted by an intuitive interface that lists several icons at the base of the screen.
Whilst we wont bore you by listing all the icons (you can see these on the screen shots) The first port of call is to head to the 'Browse' option which allows you to select radio stations based upon your current location, alternative locations or you can browse by categories - such as Sports.
In the above example clicking on the Sports category/sub-category will then display a comprehensive list of stations which can be selected by a simple finger press.
If you don’t fancy any of the default stations you can search for specific radio stations based on text search or url. Additionally if you have created an account via http://radiotime.com (partner site) this gives you access to your presets by simply logging in - via the Accounts tab.
Listening to Radio
After selecting your station it will then launch the main body of the interface which displays a small Album art icon depicting the radio station of choice (which also reveals additional information such as the presenters name), before the software taps into your data connection to stream the content to your device.
We found that on an Edge connection it can take a while for content to stream at the mid-high quality setting, but thankfully the developers have implemented an option that allows you to pick from lower quality streams (from 20 to 128kbps) depending on the station) to speed things up.
As for the quality, well we found this pretty good if truth be told - though certain stations were better than others.
Additional Features
Recording or pausing radio streams was easy as pie and we found the record option especially useful for when we wanted to playback our favourite radio stations offline.
We liked the additional option button which allowed us to view the selected radio stations schedules and access previous days radio shows (not all stations have this option mind).
The stations own web page and twitter page could also be viewed via the built in web browser which meant we could browse the web at the same time as listening to the radio.
However the ability to press the home key and listen to radio stations from different apps was not available, though the developers have a compromise in place. Certain stations have a play in background option which essentially opens up the stream in Safari, thus allowing you to continue listening to the radio station outside the app.
And the rest
The latest version also has a sleep timer which can be set to turn off the app at set intervals from 15minutes to 120minutes – ideal if you happen to fall asleep and your mobile data is being used.
Finally there is also a link which suggest alternative stations if you are bored and fancy a change or there’s a reporting tool to report any probs with any of the radio stations.
Note: Supported stream formats: MP3, AAC, WMA, Real, Ogg Vorbis, FLV; Supported stream protocols: HTTP, RTSP, MMSH, RTMP; Supported playlist formats: M3U, PLS, ASX, RAM, SMIL
