Desert Island Discs on your smartphone

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As a big fan of the long running Desert Island Discs radio programme, I was interested to see that its entire archive is now up for grabs in smartphone-friendly form on the Web, with over 500 of the shows fully downloadable in MP3 form. Thousands of guests, tens of thousands of music picks and a huge amount of auto-biographical chat, all in MP3 form. Screens and links below. Download and enjoy.

At Radio 4, we've been trying to make the experience of listening to programmes on the internet as comfortable as listening live on a radio set. For far too long, listening online has meant things like retreating to a dark home office where your computer lives, or precariously balancing your laptop on a kitchen table to catch up on The Archers.

You've been able to listen on the move with our ever-growing set of podcasts, but that normally requires you to transfer files from a computer to a gadget.

So, we're delighted that we can now offer the huge Desert Island Discs archive to listen in an easier and more portable way: on your mobile phone.

If you haven't visited the Desert Island Discs archive on your computer yet, it's a new website that lets you see thousands of public figures' eight record choices, from Ivor Novello in the 1940s right up to Cath Kidston's recent appearance and beyond.

You can listen to more than 500 programmes (as podcasts if you prefer) and can even search for particular types of people: all the politicians who have appeared on the programme, all the novelists or just comedians.

To get to the archive, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/desertislanddiscs in Web.

Here's how it looks on the Nokia N8 and other Symbian touchscreen smartphones:

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