This is the first of several posts about my new phone, the BlackBerry Storm.  I had an iPhone for a year before switching.  With that experience, just about any phone will be underwhelming.  Still the BlackBerry has been working; for me.   The biggest difference is the applications: iPhone has applications for everything while the BlackBerry has … NOTHING.

Sure I’ve tried several OTA applications.  Some work okay, while others are just plain buggy and crude.  True the phone is fairly new.   The fact remains, I miss my applications.

Which application do I miss most?   Without hesitation I say Pandora.

I was getting used to hearing about a new artist, typing it into the iPhone’s Pandora app and jammin’ out to the new musical-styling of the artist.  Fresh music to the ears can be such a pleasant blessing.

So I searched, and searched, and searched.  I found people talking about a few applications and I gave them a shot:

  1. Moodio.fm – This site provides a web interface to collect URLs for streaming audio sites around the planet. By creating an account on Moodio I was able to search for some stations by genre and add them to My Stations. Then I load the moodio.fm site from the BB Storm. By clicking on one of the stations the media player is launched playing from the stream. It worked, sort of. The streams were hard to find and the quality varied from one stream to the next. Not impressed.
  2. FlyCast – I found this one straight from BlackBerry’s web site. The experience was like a dressed up version of using moodio. Finding music and consistent quality was near impossible.
  3. nuTsie – I didn’t give this one a true comparison, because the mobile application costs $20! No way am I going to spend $20 for an application that I can’t try on a platform that has consistently given me poorly done applications. (I used countless applications on the iPhone and most were free. The only application I paid for was Snapture, which was a great camera replacement for $5.) I created an account and tried the desktop interface, it was close. Now if the mobile app was free/cheap, maybe.
  4. Slacker Radio sounds interesting, but their BlackBerry Storm application isn’t ready, yet. Waiting is such a difficult thing to do.

That leaves me still searching and waiting; waiting in silence.