1st Impressions

The Livio Car Internet Radio app is, in it’s simplest form, app for listening to streaming radio feeds in your car. The thing that makes this a mobile-friendly app is that you can not only set some favorite presets for one-touch activation, but that every one of the thousands if stations available has a numerical station ID that can be entered in to tune directly to it. While I could discern no pattern to the numbers, they don’t appear to have a pattern by genre or country for example, I did find it a handy feature.

Another nice feature of the app is that you can swipe on the screen to find similar stations. The comprehensive list by location and such is handy, but a single swipe is sure safer while driving.

While the app says that you can play streams in the background using Safari, I found that the app is fully iOS 4 aware, either by design or accident, and the streams continue to play fine as a background app on the iPhone 4. Developers are already working on some iOS 4 specific functionality, so I am really looking forward to seeing what the next release has to offer.

While I feel that the $4.99 price point is a bit high considering some of this apps competition, it is a quality app with excellent support and I’d have no problem recommending it to anyone.