Tuned to Virgin Radio - groove!!

OK, I admit - I like listening to music too (in case you've seen my postings about the ignored non-music audio content).

This morning as I went to office I found a newsbite from My-Symbian waiting in my A1000 newsreader (doHeadlines in case you forgot). About 2 in the morning My-Symbian posted a note about Virgin Radio. They offer a new service where you can listen to radio over 3G or GPRS. What you need is a player (downloadable via My-Symbian or directly from http://wap.virginradio.co.uk). Since 3 Sweden this month is offering 3G data for free, I decided to give it a try. (Virgin Radio says that their stream is about 7.2 Mbyte per hour). It took me about a minute to download the software, put an icon on my desktop in the A1000, and start listening (see picture). The sound is good enough (although not as good as a heavy MP3 file).

Technically speaking this is not different than the streamed audio services offered by 3 (the operator) which I have used before. What we are getting now is a broader range of choices, which of course may be controlled by how much our operators charge for the data traffic. And I'm really not sure if their networks can handle a large, and dense, population of customers getting streamed audio from many different radio stations - or whatever they should be called.

Because I'm currently grading a master thesis, which means reading about 70 pages, listeing to some groove music just adds value (to the thesis which is really good by itself).