Pandora Radio app review

Pandora Radio

Price: Free

For: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad with iOS 3.0 or later

Pandora Radio by Pandora Media, Inc. is a personalized radio player app for your iOS device.

All you have to do to start is enter the name of a song, artist, or composer and the app will create for you a custom “radio station” that plays similar music. Of course, you can also listen to one of the many preset radio stations if you prefer.

To help Pandora’s intuitive recommendations, you can give songs a thumbs-up on the navigation bar. This will help Pandora recognize the types of music you prefer.

Another bonus of the app is that you will hear and learn about new artists that you might not have necessarily ever heard without using Pandora.

The downside is that you can only listen to six songs per hour on any channel, which totals out to about six skips per hour. You can change channels, but even then you’re constrained and will have to listen to music you don’t like if you use up all your skips too soon. You’re also limited to a total of 40 hours of music a month.

When you hear a song you like, you can give it a thumbs up, bookmark it, purchase songs from within the app, or share on Facebook, Twitter, or email. You can also post to your Pandora profile.

The app is ad-supported, which may bother some people. If you’d rather have an ad-free listening experience, you can make an in-app purchase of $3.99 for Pandora One, which gives you the desktop application, custom skins, fewer interruptions, higher-quality audio, and no ads.

Pandora was updated to Version 4.1 on November 17, 2012. The update made numerous improvements, some bug fixes, and minor tweaks. This version of the app has 3635 customer ratings with an average of four out of five stars.

I’m not really bothered by ads so I don't mind the free version of this app. I absolutely love the intuitive programming algorithm. I find myself bored with the music selection on my iPhone (even though I have three days’ worth of music on there). This is a fantastic app that I’d recommend to anyone who wants exposure to new music.