Listening to music on mobile phones while travelling has become one of people’s favourite pastimes all across India. The sudden blossoming of radio stations everywhere has contributed to this trend. The creators of Mundu Radio believe streaming music from Internet radio stations could be the Next Big Thing. (Geodesic is the company that makes software for mobile devices with the “Mundu” name; we tested one of their other products—Mundu IM—a while ago.) We tried out the Symbian OS version on a Nokia N70. The interface is colorful and elegant. Stations are stored by genre. There are some preset stations, and you can add more manually through their site, www.radio.mundu. com. Also, the default playlist, which contains all the stations, can be updated from your account on the Mundu Radio site. Recently- played stations can be viewed quickly from a list that updates itself when you play a new station. We must say it would be nice to able to add stations directly through the software interface instead of having to log in to the Mundu Radio site to add stations to your list. We used a GPRS connection to access the streams on Mundu Radio; you can use Wi-Fi as well—if your phone supports it. The streams we used were 32 Kbps and 24 Kbps, and the performance was quite decent—they sounded good enough for a mobile phone. There was, however, a lot of buffering even with the slightest drop in signal strength. The other concern, if at all, is the rates at what you are billed for downloads. For example, using a 32 Kbps radio stream for an hour willresult in around 14 MB of data transferred. There are lots of Internet- based radio stations, and you have no shortage of music to choose from. Mundu Radio is currently a free beta and upgrades can be downloaded from their site. How good the experience will be will eventually come down to the quality of service of your provider, and also the schemes suitable for long periods of radio listening. Either way, it’s a great concept that can be implemented on the current infrastructure without hassles, and it’s definitely worth trying out. Mundu Radio is currently available for Palm, Symbian 7 and 8, and Windows Mobile devices...
Listening to music on mobile phones while travelling has become one of people’s favourite pastimes all across India. The sudden blossoming of radio stations everywhere has contributed to this trend. The creators of Mundu Radio believe streaming music from Internet radio stations could be the Next Big Thing. (Geodesic is the company that makes software for mobile devices with the “Mundu” name; we tested one of their other products—Mundu IM—a while ago.) We tried out the Symbian OS version on a Nokia N70. The interface is colorful and elegant. Stations are stored by genre. There are some preset stations, and you can add more manually through their site, www.radio.mundu. com. Also, the default playlist, which contains all the stations, can be updated from your account on the Mundu Radio site. Recently- played stations can be viewed quickly from a list that updates itself when you play a new station. We must say it would be nice to able to add stations directly through the software interface instead of having to log in to the Mundu Radio site to add stations to your list. We used a GPRS connection to access the streams on Mundu Radio; you can use Wi-Fi as well—if your phone supports it. The streams we used were 32 Kbps and 24 Kbps, and the performance was quite decent—they sounded good enough for a mobile phone. There was, however, a lot of buffering even with the slightest drop in signal strength. The other concern, if at all, is the rates at what you are billed for downloads. For example, using a 32 Kbps radio stream for an hour willresult in around 14 MB of data transferred. There are lots of Internet- based radio stations, and you have no shortage of music to choose from. Mundu Radio is currently a free beta and upgrades can be downloaded from their site. How good the experience will be will eventually come down to the quality of service of your provider, and also the schemes suitable for long periods of radio listening. Either way, it’s a great concept that can be implemented on the current infrastructure without hassles, and it’s definitely worth trying out. Mundu Radio is currently available for Palm, Symbian 7 and 8, and Windows Mobile devices...
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