Some smartphones have a built-in receiver for local FM radio stations. Since phones do not include a built-in FM antenna, they use the wire to an external headset as the antenna. While it works, you are limited to FM stations within the range of your mobile phone. Unless your mobile phone provides an option for ignoring the external headset, you must listen to the radio using the corded headset. Another option is to use Internet radio.

The term “Internet Radio” covers apps that stream music playlists, such as Pandora, to apps that stream content from an actual radio station. This article covers two apps that stream Costa Rica radio stations. These apps turn your mobile device into a AM/FM radio, without the need for an external antenna. For for you to receive a station via Internet, the station, itself, must live stream its broadcasts to the Internet. While the number of stations has increased over the years, there are still stations that do not support live streaming.

For continuous streaming, you need a high-speed Internet connection. On a slow 3G connection (512 Kbps), you may experience more interruptions. This is especially true, when your mobile device is downloading other data in the background.

tfsRadio Costa Rica brings you a wide variety of Costa Rican Radio Stations. As of this writing, tfsRadio Costa Rica lists 57 radio stations. There are a number of duplicates in the list, which reduces the count to around 50 stations. While most of the stations are FM stations, there are a few AM stations in the list. The list is not sorted, so you need to scan the list to find a particular radio station. The tfsRadio apps does not separate the stations by genre. The approach used by tfsRadio is to provide an app for each country, for a total of 182 apps.

The tfsRadio app allows you to set a sleep timer, and an alarm clock. You mark your favorite stations by tapping the star to the right of the station name that is currently playing. The app also provides a red record button. When you tap the button, the app starts recording the station. To stop the recording tap the record button again. You can then share your recoding to Facebook, email the recording, or set it as a ringtone.

The TuneIn Radio app takes a totally different approach. TuneIn Radio provides access to over 60,000 different radio stations. In addition, it provides access to over 2 million Podcasts, which were not part of tfsRadio. In spite of the number of sources, TuneIn Radio is not hard to use. The Browse tab divides the sources into the following categories:

• Local Radio uses your mobile devices coarse GPS settings to determine the list of local stations. For Costa Rica, this is about every station in the country.
• Recents is just a history of the last stations played.
• Recommended actually builds a list based on your previous selections for radio stations.
• The Music, Sports, and Talk options are top-level options that open a second menu to further refine your search. At the bottom of the second menu is a list of local stations that fall into the selected general category. When you tap an option from the second menu, you get a list of the local stations, followed by top stations, podcasts, and an explore section. The News category skips the secondary menu and takes you directly to the station list.
• The By Location option allows you to select stations from a particular country. The division of countries is rather interesting, as Mexico is consider part of North America and not Central America.
• The By Language option allows you to select stations base on language rather than location.
• Podcasts leads to a long second menu that divides podcasts into music, talk, and sports sections.

TuneIn Radio supports both a sleep timer and an alarm. To set these options, you need to tap the side bar until you get to the options menu. From main menu icon, you can set the “Car Mode,” which simplifies the interface at the expense of accessing some of the features. To save your presets, you need to create a TuneIn Radio account. On the same Account screen, you can define your Facebook and Twitter accounts for sharing your stations. To record a stream, you need the TuneIn Radio Pro version ($0.99 USD) of the app.

If you are interested in just listening to radio stations from Costa Rica, then tfsRadio Costa Rica does the job. If you want to take advantage of the widest variety of radio stations and podcasts, then TuneIn Radio is the best choice. After using both apps, I decided to go with TuneIn Radio.