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AOL Radio (free)

AOL Radio (free)

This is for the people who scoffed at the lack of built-in radio for FM and AM frequencies. AOL radio offers music from slightly more than 30 cities, with radio streamed to your phone regardless of connection — Edge, WiFi or 3G. AOL Radio uses Location Services to track down local radio stations, which are displayed by Cities in the Locals tab, with all of the available stations displayed by genre under the Stations tab. Two other interface tabs called Favorites and Recents do exactly what their names imply: they display favorite stations and recently played stations.

When a station is selected, track information and artist are displayed next to the station’s logo or album art. With certain songs, a magnifying glass — similar to the Spotlight icon in Mac OS X — displays underneath the track information; tapping this icon allows you to Find on iTunes, Find on AOL Music and Remember This Song for future reference. Adding stations to favorites is simple: Just tap the star icon in the upper right portion of the station’s menu bar.

A cautionary note: This application reminded me exactly why I use the iPod/iPhone to listen to my songs: every station I tried just happened to be running commercials at the time. That’s not a reflection of the application, which worked exactly as it should have. It’s a commentary on radio stations in general. One neat thing I noticed with this app: you can close out of the app by hitting the Home button, silencing the radio. But if you press the sleep/wake button on top of the iPhone, the radio plays, even though the screen is off.