Fed up with Vodafone and Nokia getting all the attention about their new music services like MusicStation and Music Store, 3’s launched its own unlimited music service.
3 does offer music downloads through MusicStore, but its Non Stop Music now offers 24-hour music streaming to your handset for a mere 49p a day. Unlike the above services, this is more of a mobile radio service but one that offers a dip-in-and-out user experience.
There are eight genre-based music streams (or ‘stations’) and each plays tracks on a four-hour loop. You can switch between stations at any time and new music will be updated every week.
It sounds like a neat idea but with only four-hour loops it could get a little repetitive very quickly if you listen to it a lot.
The Beeb has been quick to experiment with the iPhone’s capability for web applications, with the first fruits being its BBC Podcasts site. It lets you browse the broadcaster’s radio podcasts by station, genre or title (an A-Z list). I wrote about it earlier this month, but have been having a play with it to see how it shapes up.
It’s well designed, with a clean and easily navigable interface mirroring the way the iPod feature works on the iPhone. Clicking through (that should be thumbing through, really) to the podcast gives you a paragraph of textual description of the overall podcast, as well as a description of each individual podcast, along with their duration.
But what’s good is the Play button, which lets you stream these podcasts directly to your iPhone over Wi-Fi using Quicktime streaming - which again, means the controls for pausing and controlling the volume work in exactly the same way as the iPod feature.
Continue reading ‘iPhone Web Apps No. 2: BBC Podcasts’
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