I know, I don’t update this thing very often. I’m still into heavy development on my projects. The primary one still isn’t released, however, http://hatethegame.net is up… just not having time to do any new comics. Maybe I’ll see about getting that Apple Tablet if it has software that can help.

However, the real point of the post is touch on streaming radio apps for my Samsung Moment. I’ve been working on trying to find out which one I want to use, and strangely enough I came up with 2.

First, the ones I tried. Pandora, Slacker Radio, and Last.fm. What I primarily wanted was the ability to be able to listen to music during my commute, which includes a trip on the DC Metro system. My provider being Sprint, I often lose signal during the train portion of the commute, or digital roam over to Verizon’s network.

Pandora was easily the best for music selection. I entered a band, and soon enough I had a personal radio that was playing pretty much every song I liked. Pandora failed horribly on the metro test though. Also, Pandora has a problem where if I get a new email or text message, the alert would cause the application to skip to the next song.

Slacker Radio was next. I was able to find some channels I liked, though it doesn’t seem as good at finding similar music. My Everlast channel was basically Everlast and Uncle Kracker and that’s about it. Slacker did ace the metro test though. Not only does it aggressively cache, but it shows you how much it has cached too. Very nice. Slacker is my software of choice in the tunnels. However, it too has the same problem of skipping to the next song when I get an alert, and with the free version being limited to 6 skips a day, this can be frustrating. However, a version 2 for Android is supposed to come out with offline capability. This may prompt me to get a premium subscription, though I’d like to see if Spotify ever comes to the US.

Last.fm was the last one I tried. It’s music selection was in between Slacker and Pandora, and was more the acceptable. I put in Senser, and was getting bands like Downset, Primer 55, Stuck Mojo… really rocking out. Also, it was the only app that didn’t skip to the next song when I got an alert. However, it not only didn’t cope well in the metro, the application would get confused and sometimes appeared to take out my entire connection, requiring me to reboot the phone. Last.fm is what I listen to when I’m not in the tunnels.

Another service I would be interested in trying, if they’d ever come out with offline capability is Rhapsody.

So this concludes my review of streaming radio apps for Android on the Samsung Moment. Note, all these tests are done on a pre-CL14 phone, I haven’t gotten to the repair shop to get the upgrade yet.