This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: 12 Internet Radio Apps for iPhone + iPod touch. Additional details may be found in the original article.
VisuaMobile’s allRadio ($1) offers a compromise of sorts between AOL Radio and Tuner. Here, you get a large catalog of over 2,000 stations spread across 35 searchable genres.
There’s a nice, clean interface that starts you with a short list of options, lets you see a longer but still manageable list of featured picks, and then drops you into the massive but sorted directory of genres if you need it. Though comedy is missing as a distinct genre here, VisuaMobile includes it within Talk and Comedy, and has separate genres for Sports, News, “Nerd,” and many other categories of music and talk audio, with a decided bias in favor of 128kbps audio streams. Once again, you’re interrupting the streams midway through—like tuning into radio stations—and have no ability to search, like AOL Radio, but you have a much-expanded collection of stations to choose from.
allRadio’s missing portions are the ability to add new stations, meaning that you’re stuck with whatever’s inside this database, and any sort of interesting visualization for the individual channels that do come up.
You get a stream name, genre, and brief text description, but nothing else besides an apology if one of the selected streams doesn’t work. We strongly preferred AOL Radio’s presentation of at least miniature album art, but allRadio is stuck displaying what it gets from random Internet radio stations, which isn’t necessarily all that much. While we normally wouldn’t be thrilled by VisuaMobile’s bland presentation of stations, this is offset by the otherwise streamlined nice interface and $1 price, which isn’t AOL Radio cheap but offers a lot more content.
