Radio Pro Review

While services like Pandora and Last.FM are great, some of us still prefer to occasionally listen to an old-school radio station, or at least an internet radio station that doesn’t pick music based on our own personal preferences. Every once in a while, I like someone else to pick what they think is good music. I often discover more music listening to internet radio than with stuff like Pandora. For those of us still using these internet and old-school radio stations, radio apps for the iPhone and iPad are useful. Since just access to radio stations is nothing special, these radio apps have to have some cool features for us to drop any amount of money on them. Radio Pro has some cool features, especially considering it’s only $0.99.

Two features stand out to me as my favorites (and are alone enough to be worth the $0.99): Airplay and Dropbox support. With Airplay, the app can play the radio station through my TV which produces much better sound than the built-in speakers or earphones. Airplay plus the sleep timing means that I can use the app to listen to music as I go to sleep and not have to worry about it playing all night. Dropbox support was a feature I was kind of surprised at. I wasn’t expecting that a radio app would have a use for Dropbox. What Radio Pro does is allow the user to upload recordings (a basic, must-have feature in iOS radio apps) of the radio stations to Dropbox. This would be particularly useful for people who would like to listen to a recording of their favorite station on a work computer.

Other features that I enjoyed were a built-in browser (an unexpected feature for a radio app), quick access to favorite stations on the start-up page, a search results side bar, and the retina display graphics (making it look great on an iPad in 2x mode).

There were two problems I had with the app. The Twitter and Facebook icons don’t allow the user to share the station via those sites, they are simply links to the Radio Pro pages on both of those sites. Also, the favorite stations list has a few stations that start off in the list that need deleted. Overall, for $0.99, it’s well worth the few unique features.
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