Listening to Internet Radio with Your Treo Smartphone
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I’ve been quite impressed with the functionality of my Treo 600 smartphone. In addition to such basic tasks as making and receiving phone calls, the Treo handles more esoteric functions, including allowing me to send email messages using its full QWERTY keyboard. Like many Treo users, I subscribed to an unlimited data plan with my service carrier. This gives me the liberty to connect to the Internet via my Treo for as long as I want, without having to worry about paying for per-byte/per-minute data plan usage. For my cell phone carrier, the cost is about ten bucks a month. In this article, I’ll show you how to use the power of your Treo smartphone as well as your unlimited data plan to listen to Internet radio, making your Treo a pretty powerful portable audio device.
Using Pocket Tunes
To listen to Internet radio on your Treo smartphone, you’ll need an application called Pocket Tunes, a music player for Palm OS 5 devices. At the time of writing, Pocket Tunes is in version 3.1 and comes in three flavors:
- Basic
- Deluxe
- Smartphone Essentials
To listen to streaming audio from Internet radio stations, you need at least the Deluxe version. The good news is that you can download Pocket Tunes Deluxe, try it for 15 days, and then decide whether you want to buy it.
Installation and configuration of Pocket Tunes is relatively straightforward:
- Launch the installer in Windows. When asked which components you want to install, choose both the Pocket Tunes and Windows Media Player Integration components, as shown in Figure 1.
- The installer asks which optional components to install. If you have a Treo 600, choose the Low-Res Skin option; if you have a Treo 650, choose the High-Res Skin option (see Figure 2).
- After the installation process is complete, synchronize your Treo and your desktop to install Pocket Tunes onto your Treo.
- When synchronization is complete, launch Pocket Tunes on your Treo by tapping the pTunes icon (see Figure 3).
- After Pocket Tunes launches, tap the Eject button (see Figure 4).
- In the Choose Songs screen, tap the New button (see Figure 5).
- The next screen asks for an Internet audio URL (see Figure 6). Enter the URL for the Internet radio broadcast you want to hear, as shown in Figure 7; then click OK. (See the next section for information on finding stations.) Pocket Tunes then displays the station name for the URL you entered (see Figure 8).
- Repeat steps 6–7 to create additional links as desired.
- When you’re ready to listen to a station, select the station in the
list on the Choose Songs page and click OK. After your Treo connects to the URL,
the audio broadcast will begin (see
Figure 9).
The graphical interface of Pocket Tunes is pretty intuitive to use. You can control the volume of your broadcast from the interface, for example.
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