if you have a blackberry, iphone, or compatible windows mobile phone, and happen to love music, then you should really have the pandora radio app for your device. i have had this app installed on my iphone since it was first made available, and always found it to be very cool, even thought the sound was a little lower quality than i liked. however, improvements in streaming quality from pandora have made this my number one choice for music in the car. more on that in a bit.
for those of you that don’t know, pandora is an online radio provider that allows you to customize your very own internet radio station. to get started, you just search for the name of an artist you’d like to hear, and click “create a station.” presto! a channel based around that artiest. pandora uses something called the “music genome project” to add music to your station based on all kinds of data they have collected. i’m not going to get into the specifics, but they are usually dead on. if a song comes on that you don’t like, simply thumb it down and it will never grace your station with it’s presence again. you can also add an artist or song to your mix. i have been manicuring 3 stations in my account for over a year now, and i very rarely get a song i don’t enjoy anymore.
the real beauty of pandora is the mobile applications i mentioned at the beginning of this post. especially if you have a way to hook your device up to your car stereo. i have never used anything but the iphone app, but i’m sure the experience is similar. when first released, the sound quality over the cellular network (3g or edge), was pretty poor. so poor in fact that i quit using it. however, the most recent release has vastly improved sound quality. it sounds really close to cd quality to my ears (make sure you have “higher quality audio” turned on in the settings.
the application works over edge, but i find that less than satisfactory. it really shines over 3g. the only time i ever turn on my radio anymore is to listen to npr, and there is no way i’d ever subscribe to satellite radio now. this free application and service offer all the music i could possible ingest while driving around the city, or running on the treadmill at the gym. i’ve found that at&t’s 3g service here is really good, and if i do happen to drop off into edge territory for a half mile or so, pandora doesn’t skip a beat.
the only drawback i’ve found to using pandora in the car is battery life. with your 3g connection running full time, it can suck your battery down, though my nearly hour commute to work has never drained more than an 1/8th of my battery. i’d suggest grabbing a car charger just in case.
as a music lover, pandora has been on my radar since its inception. now that the mobile quality has been improved, it has become my first choice for music when on the road. give it a try, and let me know what you think!
you can find out everything about pandora for your device at pandora’s mobile application site.
