BlackBerrys are great little radios, when you have the right applications loaded. If you’re looking for a flexible radio application for your BlackBerry, Nobex Radio Companion is a free application to try. Radio Companion offers 3000 world stations, 2700 of which you can see the playlists. What you notice first about Radio Companion is that it opens up to a nice visual album-image view, displaying the image of the current radio artist along with song details on the screen.

To get started, just select Add Stations from the BlackBerry menu button. You can search for radio stations by City, or if you click the menu button again, by Genre. Search by city and select one that is interesting to you, like your local city. Once the city is highlighted, select Open from the menu. A list of radio stations for your chosen city will open. Clicking that city with your trackball will bring up Select on the menu. Click it and Radio Companion will retrieve a playlist. You’ll begin to stream from the station, or you can scroll through songs on the playlist and choose to play those.

What’s extremely cool is the capability to view lyrics of songs where there’s an album view on your playlist. Play the song, then click on Lyrics and More from the menu. You’ll see the entire lyrics of the song, with the album image as a backdrop. If you scroll to the particular line of the lyrics and click Syncronize, the lyrics will scroll automatically with the song. This feature doesn’t necessarily work for non-internet radio stations, like an NPR radio station, where playlists are not available.

Other features:

• Find stations and add them to your Favorites, which will be accessible from the main menu
• Get the songs or ringtones or have the details of a song emailed to you from within the application
• Can be played if you have wi-fi only
• Audio output: speaker, handset, earphones, bluetooth

The free version displays advertisements between songs in the playlist. A downside to the free version is that there seem to be more international stations than free US stations. If you check the 80’s genre, there seem to be only 6 or 7 free stations, compared to the 23 international stations. Even so, there’s bound to be something you’ll like. The paid Premium version offers international stations, customization with your own pictures, and access to the My Account page on www.nobexrc.com that allows you to see the list of your most recent favorite songs.

All in all, Nobex Radio Companion is an enjoyable application with plenty of stations and music to explore. The capability to view song lyrics makes this a great addition to your BlackBerry radio collection.