Handango Introduces "Free App Friday"

Beginning today, Handango is offering a free, premium mobile application every Friday (CST) on its website. Today's offering is mundu IM for Smartphone, which I reviewed in May of this year. Click here to get your free app.

Listen to Streaming Music (Internet Radio) on Your i wireless Phone

This is my new favorite application! With Mundu Radio, you can listen to streaming music on your Symbian, Windows Mobile or Palm-based mobile device. According to Mundu, there are over 50,000 radio stations broadcasting on the internet. You can listen to any of these stations through Mundu Radio if they stream in MP3 format. I listened to a number of the 50 stations that come with Mundu Radio "out of the box" and soon discovered for myself what Mundu's FAQs would have told me: At GPRS speeds, you want to make sure that you are listening to stations streaming at 24 or 32 kbps or you will encounter breaks as the Mundu Radio client rebuffers the stream. Finding stations broadcasting at that bit-rate takes a bit of trial and error, but once you know which stations you have to choose from, listening to them is enjoyable enough. If you have a phone with Wi-Fi (like the HTC S620), you can listen to stations with higher bit-rates over a Wi-Fi connection. There were a few streams that I was unable to connect to, such as Sporting News Radio, but with over 50K stations to choose from, I can probably get my sports news elsewhere.

If you would like to try this application out for yourself, you can download it for free here.

Instant Messaging for Your Windows Mobile Device

It has been a while since I posted anything about instant messenger applications available for your mobile device. Geodesic is one of a number of companies I talked to while at CTIA 2007. They have developed a mobile application that they call mundu IM. This application is interoperable with all the major IM services (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Jabber and ICQ), and you can be logged into all of the services simultaneously. I recently took advantage of mundu's 5-day free trial and was impressed.

Although I don't regularly use IM, I do have a screen name for five of the six services, so I entered in all of my information, and when I started up the application, I had no problems logging into any of the services. Mundu IM is fairly intuitive. All of your contacts are viewable with an icon next to them, showing which IM service they are on, and you have the option of sorting your contacts by the groups (folders) they are in or the IM service that they are on. There are a number of other user-customizable options as well, including the ability to set a different presence status for the different IM services and you can choose whether or not you want to see your offline contacts. You can even access saved chats (although I'm not sure how long they are stored) and mundu IM will tell you if you have unread e-mail if you have active e-mail accounts with any of these services.

As I stated earlier, I'm not a big IM user, so I didn't put mundu IM through extreme testing with multiple chats going on at the same time (although I think it has that capability) but it worked well enough in the 1-to-1 chats that I tried. The application did not run incredibly fast, but it was noticeably faster than EQO (Although, to be fair, I tested EQO last Fall, and it was on a Motorola KRZR. They may be due for a retest). I'm sure as our network data speed increases and the processors on these mobile devices get faster, mundu IM will run faster as well.

I know software versions can sometimes be misleading, but Geodesic brags that mundu IM is v4 (EQO is still in beta). It does have the refinement that comes from a more mature product. Geodesic sells a lifetime license for mundu IM for $11. If I was a bigger IM user, I would not hesitate to buy it.

Currently mundu IM is only available for Palm and Windows Mobile, but they promise to soon have versions available for Symbian and Windows Mobile Pocket PC.