Listening to the radio on your iPhone may not seem like a big deal. Many phones already have this function, and it isnt normally featured as a big battery drain. However, with the amount of flak that the iPhone battery is getting from users, every little thing that the iPhone does comes in for its share of careful scrutiny.

There are many applications for stream Internet radio that are compatible for IPhones. Most people choose the application that will give them good streaming quality and hopefully not too many commercials to ruin the listening experience, but now considerations of battery consumption also come into play.

Streaming Internet radio applications are different from public radio stations in that they allow users to create a sort of private radio station that features specific music genres and/or artists. This makes it especially appealing for IPhone users who like to play music in the background while they are doing other things, whether on their iPhone or not. There is nothing more distracting than music that irritates or annoys you coming on in the middle of an especially crucial part of what you are working on. It is distracting and, well, annoying.

One of the more popular applications today for streaming Internet radio is Pandora, which can be purchased via iTunes and is currently free of advertisements. The quality of the music is said to be very good, with no static or skipping whether over the 3G network or WiFi.  However, there is a growing concern that Pandora uses quite a bit of juice, especially when accessed over 3G. Reports suggest that accessing radio streams over the WiFi provides lower battery consumption. No benchmark is yet available for actual consumption of the Pandora application.

Another popular application is ooTunes, which can access selections made over other applications such as Pandora. It supports formats in mp3, AAC and WMA, among others. In WiFi, It consumes about 0.17% of your battery per minute of listening to the radio when in mp3 format. In AAC, it consumes 0.148% per minute.

Pocket Tunes uses a whopping 0.3% per minute for mp3 format and a better 0.14% per minute for AAC. Wunder Radio, on the other hand, uses only 0.2% per minute for mp3 but 0.35% for AAC format! So this means that playing on AAC format is not always better. However, it seems to be widely accepted that streaming over the WiFi is definitely less battery consuming than over 3G. More bad news for 3G fans.

On average, using the best possible combination of media format and delivery system, these statistics mean that if you listen to your radio continuously with no other application active, you will zero out your iPhone battery from full charge in about 11 hours and 15 minutes. No big deal, right? Sure, if you only use your IPhone as a radio. But if you do your research and have a clear idea of what your priorities are in choosing the applications you have running, listening to the radio should not become a matter of life or death, at least for your battery.

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