iheartradio
Description: iheartradio delivers over 750 of America’s favorite radio stations right to your Android phone. Bookmark your favorite stations, view lyrics and enjoy on-demand content including exclusive performances, songs and intimate vignettes from today’s hottest music stars. We also feature some of the best talk stations in the USA.
Version: 2.2.2
Cost: Free
Developer: Clear Channel Radio Digital
iheartradio is more like ICan’tGetStationsUnlessI’mOnWiFiRadio. I’d really like iheartradio to work. I ride a commuter bus to and from work and there are tv’s on the bus which usually shows sporting events. The volume is turned down real low, so I can’t hear what the commentators are saying. I’m in the San Francisco area and there was a San Francisco Giants baseball game on so I tried to tune into one of the stations on iheartradio to follow the game. Sadly I couldn’t even find a local sports station. The number of stations are very limited. There we’re some sports stations for Rochester, Houston, Seattle, and more cities, but I didn’t find any local sports stations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
So I tried tuning into a random local station on 3G, but it would be stuck on “connecting”. The bus I ride has wi-fi, albeit really slow wi-fi around .5 Mbps, so I tried tuning in via the slow wi-fi connection. Low and behold it connected to the station after a minute or 2 of buffering. It only works on 3G once in a blue moon, but usually it’s stuck buffering or trying to connect. At home, when I try iheartradio on a fast wi-fi connection, it connects to the stations every time.
Connection problems aside, let’s skip to when it does work. The amount of local radio stations available are underwhelming. In the San Francisco area, there are 8 total stations. 1 traffic station, 2 talk radio stations, 3 Hip Hop / R & B stations, and 1 adult contemporary station. But there are a good amount of national channels ranging from Ryan Seacrest’s top 40 station, to Oldies, to Country, to Fox Sports, to White House briefings.
Once connected to a station, you can tag favorite songs, randomize radio stations, add stations to your favorite list. So unless you’re in constant range of a wi-fi connection iheartradio radio is useless.
Edit: 7/24/2011 – I’ve been hearing a lot of advertisements by iheartradio recently so I decided to give it another try since my original post was over a year ago. With app upgrades and better hardware since a year ago I wanted to see if things have changed. iheartradio is working like a charm now. I even tried running iheartradio on only 2G and I was able to pick up radio stations clearly without any buffering. Lack of local radio stations is still an issue. I couldn’t find any local sports radio stations in my area.
Trying to listen to my favorite talk radio station using my phone and my new blue tooth headphones, at work, but it has been trying to connect for at least 20 minutes so far. Worked yesterday, although cut out a lot. What is the point if you can’t conncect? May as well turn on the old fashioned radio on my desk…..