Free Streaming Radio Comes To The iPad With Radio.Com
One of my favorite categories of apps on the iPhone was radio because I could listen to internet streams of radio shows out of my area and with hundreds of stations available online, there was always great content to sample from all over the country. Thankfully, iPad won't be seeing any shortage of radio apps as the first one from Radio.com has made its way into the App Store.
Radio.Com comes from CBS Interactive along with several content providers like AOL Radio, Yahoo! Radio and Last.fm to bring streaming radio stations to your iPad. The app boasts hundreds of stations to choose from and from categories like News, Music, and Sports. With AOL Radio, Yahoo and Last.fm on board, you have a wide variety of compilation stations like Top Country Hits, Hip Hop and songs from specific decades to sample from. You can also log in using your Last.fm profile to keep track of the songs you listen to and share with the popular social networking music website.
The app has a great design with buttons to access your category of radio at the bottom and a box at the top to indicate your current station and current song playing. You can easily select stations to include in your Favorite tab with a simple push of a star button so you don't need to search for them each time you access the app. A box on the lower half of the screen provides news and notes from the radio station you're currently listening to. You can also search for your radio stations by location using the Map tab.
Radio.com has definitely done a great job using the iPad's extra screen space and interface to bring you radio you can read, touch and listen to. Unfortunately without multitasking functionality, you won't be able to exit the app to do much of anything else on your iPad. It would've been nice to include a web browser to do some light surfing but at a cost of free, you can't really complain.
