App review: Grab Radio World

We all love listening to the radio and with so many apps out there to choose from it can be difficult to know which one to go for. Grab Radio World is an Irish made app for iOS and Symbian that allows you to choose from over 40,000 radio stations to listen to from around the world. For this review my test device was an iPod touch 4G running OS 5.0.1.

Compared to some other radio apps I’ve used I think it’s extremely fast for both navigation and loading of a radio stream. The app has some very nice features. It’s very easy to mark a station as a favourite and you can choose from a variety of stream qualities if there’s more than one available. You can either browse for a station based on a location around the world or style of radio (talk radio, sports or music) and it’ll also identify local stations based on your current location. You can also search for a radio station you want if you already know it’s name.

If you like a song you hear and want to buy it you can “grab” it (if the station is compatible) from iTunes and even if you dont know the song name you can use Shazam, if you’ve got it installed, to identify the song. I did find that the “grab”, “more” and “tag” options didn’t come up on many radio stations but the Shazam funtion more than made up for this short fall. There’s also a tag option to allow you to store a song you like for later. It’s a pity there’s not more radio stations offering these features but one such station in Dublin is Spin 103.8 FM. The “more” option if available will allow you to view the song’s video on youtube or share the song on twitter, myspace or facebook. These features are very neat and for me they make Grab Radio World stand out from other radio apps I’ve used.

For those amongst us who like to listen to the radio in bed at night there’s a sleep timer to shut off the radio after a set period of time of your choosing. There’s an auto restart switch so that if the network or wifi signal fails, then returns, the app will restart playing the station automatically saving you some time. You can also choose to buffer the stream for between 5 and 20 seconds. Finally there’s the option to use the highest quality streams when you’re in a wifi area, so you dont waste your 3G data.

Grab Radio World is available in the iTunes store at the very reasonable price of €1.59. You can get it here. We’ve a free copy to give away so if you’d like it tell us why in the comments section below and we’ll pick a winner on Monday.