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.

Listen to Your iTunes Music Collection on Your Mobile Phone

Avvenu Music Player is another compelling mobile application I learned about while at CTIA 2007. I guess this would be considered a place-shifting technology (a la the Slingbox). With Avvenu, you can stream your iTunes playlists from your home computer to your Windows Mobile 5 smartphone. You can also share your playlists with your friends.

For the Avvenu Music Player to work, you need to download an application to both your host computer and the WM 5.0 device that requires you

Once you sign up for a free Avvenu Music Player account, you simply need to install the Avvenu Connector software on the PC with your Apple iTunes® music collection and install the Avvenu Music Player to your mobile device. Then you will launch the Avvenu Music Player on your PC (which runs within an internet browser) and select which songs or podcasts you want to be able to listen to on your mobile device. The beta version of the Avvenu Music Player includes Anytime storage of up to 250 music tracks.

I was initially disappointed that I was not able to get this to work right away, but soon realized that Avvenu needed to upload my selections. Since my computer was not on and connected the entire time, this took a couple of days. Once I had filled up my 250 track quota, though, it worked as advertised. It was pretty cool to hear the songs I had stored on my computer emanating from my S620, and yes, it even worked when my computer was turned off.

Once I got beyond the initial "Wow" factor, I realized pretty quickly that this application just isn't quite ready for prime time yet (which makes sense, as it is still in beta testing). It takes a few minutes for my playlist to load when I start up the application on my mobile device, and while longer before I could get it to play my first selection. Once the music does start streaming, there is a good 60 seconds of silence in-between tracks as well. I don't know how much of these delays can be attributed to network data speeds and how much to attribute to this being a beta version. Only time will tell.

I guess if you really want to be able to listen to your iTunes collection on your phone, this application will do, but as a music lover I find the dead silence between songs annoying enough that I will probably be uninstalling Avvenu from my device soon.