Description: Listen to over thirty thousand radio stations on your iPhone with WunderRadio. WunderRadio provides a quick and easy way to play thousands of streaming Internet radio stations and other audio streams on your iPhone.

Developer: Weather Underground

Price £3.99 ($6.99)

I thought I would review this app as I felt it would come in useful to me; I was definitely right. I really love this app. It has excellent functionality. This app allows you to access literally thousands of radio stations and there is definitely a radio station for anyone. The app allows you to select the radio stations you like and place them into a “favourites” tab. When you just want to listen to your desired station, the app is pretty simple to use; the ability to search for a specific station makes it quite useful.

Something that attributes to the quality of this app is the simplicity to learn more about unknown artists. When you hear a new artist that you like, simply press the Last.fm button and you’re taken straight to the Last.fm website through the built-in browser to learn more about them. I find this beneficial as it helps me to discover new artists; you can also still be listening to your desired music station at the same time. The radio stations will still stream over 3G and EDGE connections with a minimum of 12Kbits/s, which means it is difficult to not get a connection. Great for listening to stations on the go.

I think that there are some things that could be improved with this app. Browsing through the app to find new radio stations is quite long winded to find anything. For example I can browse music by Genre, which sounds really cool but there is only a choice of about twenty genre’s; considering there are over thirty thousand stations I think that narrowing them down into twenty genre’s is being a bit too general; I select a genre and then I get a choice of about 12 “featured stations”. It gives you an option to look at more stations of that genre, which you select and then it shows a ridiculous amount of stations in alphabetical order. I feel that unless you know what radio stations you like you wouldn’t want to spend ages browsing and trying so many unknown stations.

There are also some points that I am probably being quite meticulous about but thought I should mention. The app just isn’t as elegant as I would like for an iPhone app. This doesn’t get in the way of the apps functionality but I always think that beauty is important when designing software. I find it really irritating that the app can’t be run as a background app. I know that this isn’t feasible but if I’m using this app and I want to send someone a text message for example then I have to quit the app. [Editors note - not technically the developers fault; Apple doesn't allow applications to run in the background.]

Pros

  • Over thirty thousand Stations
  • Web browser, with simple to access to Last.fm
  • Great for discovering new music
  • Radio stations will stream through Edge and 3G stations

Cons

  • Not so elegant
  • Searching for new stations can become monotonous

Verdict

After reviewing this app, knowing what I know about it I would still definitely recommend it. For such effortless access to an impressive amount of radio stations, which even run on 3G and EDGE connections this app is definitely worth buying.