The FM Radio

It's been quiet in the office this week, by that I mean that a number of people are off enjoying sunnier climbs and I've needed something to break the silence, other than the laserjet on the other side of the office. So given I've not got a large enough SD-mirco card to put a reasonable music collection on yet, I've resorted to the on board radio.

The first thing to note is like a number of other handsets with on board FM the Touch Pro uses the headphones as an antenna, so you can't use the neet little box as a really compact radio as you have to have the dangly headphones plugged in to even start the app.

Once the app starts it auto scans for the strongest signals and sets them as presets, it managed to pick out my favorite stations first time, selecting them is easy enough from the GUI, the buttons are big enough to operate with your thumb. There are 20 save slots for presets, 6 of which can be access by one touch from the portrait screen and 8 from the landscape (keyboard out) screen - the FM radio does not use the G-sensor to rotate the screen. The rest of the presets can be easily accessed from the presets menu at the bottom of the screen.

The interface also comes complete with a mute button, speaker/headphones selector, seek/tune buttons, stero/mono selector. It also displays the signal strength as two little bars on either side of the frequency readout, above which is the station name and the off button, which is close enough to the 'x' button that you can just arbitraly go for either.

Another neat feature is that as the headphones connect via the extUSB port the device knows when they've been unplugged and pauses the radio app, and asks if you'd like to replace the headphones or close the app altogether. Also unlike the TouchFLO media player (or the standard Windows Media Player, the radio keeps playing if you put hit the power button on top, meaning you save your battery life.

It also has a sleep function so if, like me, you get to sleep faster with say Today In Parliment in the background you can have it turn off after 30,60 or 90 minutes.

All in all a very nice little app that really adds to the overall usefulness of the device - did I mention that the reception was great too?