My iPad Is A Radio

I have an iPad 2 that sits in a stand on my office desk. It doesn’t go anywhere any more. It’s old and thrashed out, permanently plugged into power, jacked into the desktop speakers and good for very little. It is, essentially, my office radio.

And these apps:

  • Soma FM Drone Zone
  • BBC iPlayer Radio
  • Monocle 24
  • Bloomberg Radio
  • Longplayer (not really radio)
  • Mixcloud (again, not strictly radio, but.)

And, of course, an instance of my favoured podcast app, Downcast, which syncs with another instance on my iPhone.

Over the top of all that, I run Panic Status Board, which is configured to show me, among other things, the time in the various time zones I’m working in, weather in those time zones, selected newsfeeds and my calendar. But that’s just a bonus. I could do everything else with an old phone working off wifi. And I probably will, once this old iPad next to me finally joins all the other radios I have loved, from the massive radiogram chest to the two-deck cassette AM/FM machine I used to record John Peel and Annie Nightingale on, back in the dark ages…