Mundu Radio is a multi-platform software application for digital radio, allowing you to stream hundreds of stations from around the world straight to your handset. Which is something that the Nokia Internet Radio application can already do, but does Mundu add enough to this mix to make it worthwhile?

While I don't think there is enough in Mundu Radio to sway those of you with Nokia Internet Radio on your device, that's not true for everyone using S60. For a start there are versions of this that are compatible with Symbian OS 7.0 and 8.0, as well as the current phones, so there's an argument that Mundu Radio has a huge potential audience. It's worth pointing out that Mundu is cross platform, and their apps, including Radio, reach over Symbian, Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile, so this isn't just a windmill tilting exercise at Mundu towards the Finns.

One main difference, and this is in part down to the social set of features on the main Mundu site that unfortunately aren't in the S60 version, is that you need to register online for a username and password before you can run the application. This seems a little bit excessive - although it does give Mundu a list of people actually using the application, the kickback to the user is not huge.

Mundu does come with a good number of stations already in its database (that comes on the device with the installation) – all sorted by genre so you can, for example, easily switch between all the Blues stations in the world when you need a little bit of melancholy in your life. And if your station isn't listed, it's a simple matter to add it in, as long as you know the direct URL to the stream.

And here comes the rub with Mundu Radio. The content of stations, the key part of the application, is not under their control. I came across a number of stations that simply did not work, or were no longer broadcasting – except Mundu just simply stops at a screen saying “connecting...” with no timing out or messages to alert you that there may be a problem. Not nice at all.

Other platforms running Mundu Radio have the ability to edit their playlist of stations online, or look up the lyrics of songs currently playing. Unfortunately these functions aren't present on the Symbian version, which is a shame as these could have been useful differentiators to make Mundu Radio worth the effort.

When you get past all this, Mundu radio does play streams nicely. Audio quality is dependent on two things, the quality of your connection (be it Wifi, 3G or GPRS) and the bit rate of the individual audio streams, two things not really under control of Mundu themselves, but are key to the app. A certain amount of caching goes ahead, and with good WiFi coverage I was able to listen to the 128kbit/s streams comfortably, but a few rooms away from my router and those channels started to struggle to feed enough data to the app.

What it doesn't do is integrate very well with S60. The volume keys are not registered, you have to use the cursor keypad to change the volume of the playing stream, the menus don't follow the S60 style guide and ultimately there is very little good feedback to make this a friendly application to use.

Mundu Radio is nice, but it offers absolutely nothing new, compared to streaming media applications already present on most S60 devices, it asks you to jump through a number of hoops, and while it might be an alternative for those not able to use Nokia's Internet Radio solution, it's not up to replacing the application if you have it already.

-- Ewan Spence, July 2009.