Nokia Internet Radio Review

As I said, I wanted to review the just released application “Nokia Internet Radio” and can proudly say I just finished.

General:

Nokia Internet Radio is a freeware which can play internet streams. It has preinstalled exactly one thousand radio stations from all over the world. Also exotic stations of countries like Chile, Hong Kong or Urugay are represented. If there aren’t any stations which you like hearing, there is still the alternative to manually add some.

Unfortunaly, the software is still in beta state and supports only few devices. At the point of testing it, the supported phones were the N95, N95 8GB, N82 and the a little older music phone N91.

Course of the program:

At the first start, the program asks you which connection you want to choose for listening to the radio. Because I have a WLAN at home, I chose my FritzBox connection. If you are on the way, you can easily change the connection in the setting to a data connection like GPRS or UMTS. Of course you must do this step only at the first application start.

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After choosing the acces point, you get to the main menu.

There you can choose between you favourite stations (can be manually chosen), the station directory, where all the existing stations are listed by categories, or the simplest option to just have try, whether your station is preinstalled, by searching.
If you have already listend to the radio, you can jump to last played station by choosing the menu point “Last played station”.

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As you can see, I took “Station directory”. The stations are assorted clearly in the categories “Genre”, “Language” and ”Country”. A list of twenty “Top Stations” is also available.

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At first I was happy to see 63 stations for my mother tongue German.

Other languages:

Englisch: 235 stations

Frensh: 57 stations

Spanish: 33 stations
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You may have noticed, I wrote “At first I was happy to see 63 Stations.”

Because when I entered the menu, I didn’t find any station which was known to me.

Disappointed I chose some station, to show you the next step.

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For a short time the application buffers the stream and then plays the radio station.

The radio player is built very lucid like the normal S60 music player. Top left you can see the data rate. In the example the radio played with 192 kbps, which provided good sound quality.

Under the menu point “Options”, you can either stop the radio playing, get “Station information”, add the station to your “Favourites”, call up the “Settings” menu, look for help or exit Internet Radio.

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 A description of the station can be looked up in the “Station Details”.

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In the “Settings”, Nokia provided really good work. That you can listen to the radio with a data connection without lags, the bitrate is automatically reduced by the application.

However, the settings can be changed if they do not match your imagination.

Also the acces point can be changed here.

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Finally I show you the option to add a station manually. I tried it with the stations I really missed under the preinstalled ones, but I did not have the time to find a stream having a supported format.

Streams in the formats mp3/aac/aac+ are supported.d

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Design:

I really love the design of Nokia Internet Radio. The application doesn’t use your activated theme, but the theme which is as far as I know also preinstalled on the N95 8GB.

Sound Quality:

Of course the quality depends always on the bitrate of the stream you are playing. But I can say, that you can’t abandon anyting at a bitrate of at least 128 kbps.

At 64 kbps you can hear some cracks and other sound disorders. Taken for granted, you can not count that against the application. 

Different to the built in FM radio, the volume is not too low. However, it can’t keep pace with the music player’s volume.

Stations:

This is the point I am most disappointed about. Like I said, I did not find a station I know. That might be different in your case, but you can not deny there could be a larger choice of stations.

In the next version could also be implemented more formats supported for manually added streams. No stream did work for me.

Result:

Despite of the lacks of Nokia Internet Radio, it is a very good appliation. Good design, well thought out settings, clear layout, good sound quality.

You mustn’t forget, Nokia’s newest coup is still in beta state. If all the points of criticism are improved, I can unstrictedly advise this application.