Shoutcast alone offers tens of thousands of stations to pick from (you’ll need the Pro version of Net2Station to see all of them). Streaming quality is excellent and buffering is good enough that you’ll rarely see any skipping even on a crowded Wi-Fi network such as in your Gym. The interface is high-contrast and usable, but some of the station names can appear obscure because they get cut off after a few words. The app also lets you see how many other uses are listening to any given station, so you can make the call on whether you want to trade-off quality against popularity. Overall, this is a very functional online radio streaming application on the Palm Pre.

With each channel, you can block specific artists from playing. If you enjoy a certain genre but don’t care for a particular set of artists within this genre, you can block them and listen peacefully. The interface is structurally very nice, with the bottom menu bar allowing you to navigate to any screen. AccuRadio also presents a “Now Playing” button to get more artist and album information. The controls also let you pause and skip tracks. The color scheme on the other hand, means that black text is hardly visible on the dark purple background. This leaves the app looking a little unpolished. However, once you get used to the controls you’ll hardly notice these aspects – after all, a radio app is meant to be left on in the background. This is a nice functional radio app for the Palm Pre.

You’ve seen the video walkthrough of Pandora here previously (see archives) but that didn’t quite show off the nicer features. As Pandora runs in the background, you can access a subset of features directly via a dedicated notification tab. You can thumbs-up or down, play and pause, and see the track title without switching applications. This is an absolute gem of an app, and easily one of the best of apps on the Palm Pre apps catalog at the moment.