Police Scanner 5-0 Radio Pro

p dir="ltr">Got bored with your car radio and favorite music on your phone? Here is a solution! This unique application allows you to catch police radio waves in several countries on the globe straight into your phone. Entertain yourself with a realistic simulation of a patrol car in the post. It’s totally legal!

Design and Usability 8/10

Police Scanner is designed in best Windows Mobile UI traditions. Black background, white and yellow tiles, that’s it. There is a convenient station browser, where channels are divided by countries, regions, and localities. Just choose one of the thousands of channels in your native language and enjoy. Upper yellow tile always shows the quality of the stream and the number of listeners at the moment. However, app’s appearance lacks visualization of the police radio station to provide a more immersive experience.

Key Functions 8/10

Surprisingly, Police Scanner is able to catch signals of more, than 1 thousand stations worldwide. Amongst countries are USA, UK, Austria, Chile, Germany, Canada, Venezuela, Switzerland, and others. Even though it’s a radio playback application, you don’t need a radio antenna as streams are transmitted via the Internet. Data consumption is quite low, because of the average bitrate. It fluctuates between 14 -20 Kb.

Each country’s police department has its own 10-codes. They are used to cipher different commands, conditions, and situations. For that purpose, Police Scanner has a help menu, where you can get acquainted with lists of these encodings. Unfortunately, not all of them match departments. However, there are no problems with US regions.

Even though it is called a Police Scanner, you can find channels of Ambulance, Fire departments, and even air control rooms.

Security 10/10

Police Scanner doesn’t require any special permissions, because it doesn’t use personal data. So, it’s totally secure. The only drawback of the free version is an advertisement, which pops up unexpectedly, so you may accidentally tap it. Stability of performance is on the high level. This application has no specific hardware or software requirements.

In-app purchases

Police Scanner is available for free, but if you would like to remove the advertisement, it’s necessary to purchase the Pro version. There are no more additional features in the paid version.

The Verdict

Police Scanner 5-0 Radio is recommended to those people, who like following police reports. The channel database is more than comprehensive, so you will definitely find your US region stream with no problems. However, it certainly lacks favourites feature to add your most-listened channels into a separate folder. Still, it’s the best police radio for Windows mobile so far.