Nokia Home Music HD-1
The Great Lost Jukebox turns up in captivity
Review Best known today for its mobile phones, Nokia has released a connected jukebox at a knock down price. Nokia Home Music is an unusual beast: essentially it's a radio – primarily an Internet radio – built around a giant mono 10W speaker, but there's a Swiss Army knife selection of I/O options for getting music in and out of the box.
Nokia Home Music: the remote is smaller than the picture suggests.
Like the toy cow, Dougal, it's nearer the camera.
The Nokia Home Music HD-1 can pick up music from a domestic media server using UPnP, or from an attached USB device, or with its standard aux input. It can also play, but not store, podcasts. Unusually, for something in the iPhone speaker price bracket, it can compliment a home hi-fi system from its phono and optical S/PDIF ports. And it has a nice simple Nokia UI, so it looks and feels like a Nokia and should be familiar to anyone who has used a Nokia phone, without recourse to the manual.
So, this is an interesting and unusual piece of kit and you may be wondering why you haven't heard about it before. For the most unusual thing about Nokia Home Music is the curious story behind it. The device was first unveiled at Nokia World in September 2008, with staff at the low-profile booth predicting a launch late that year.
It debuted stateside at CES 2009 four months later, where it won some praise for its design and ambition. And then,… nothing. NHM has never been marketed. It was never sent to consumer magazines or newspapers for review. Dredging the oceans of the interweb brings up just one blog post.
I wasn't even sure where I could find this missing beastie, since it isn't listed under "Accessories" on the Nokia UK webstore. But Nokia UK dispatched one the next day. And here it is - for £135.
Configuring the device comprises of just five menus
So here, then, is Nokia's Great Lost Jukebox Thingy - in capitivity, and reviewed in the UK for the first time.
Next page: Setup and First Impressions
COMMENTS
Networking
Humm UPnP and DLNA supported...are these two protocols OS supported by the nowadays Apple products? No!? So, why blaming Nokia for not supporting Apple products and not blaming Apple for lack of support for two widespread protocols, uh Mr Orlowski?
Backend support
A persistent issue I have with internet radio devices is their reliance on a web server somewhere to keep running and providing the routing information for each channel. Does this radio need to talk to Nokia to work properly? I guess they should be around for many years to come, but who knows if this service will be something they continue to value? Looks interesting though...
The cult of "i"
What a nightmare having to spend all that time reading an article when you could have been fiddling with your "i" devices which have a reputation for *hite sound quality.
£100 too much
So, no built in storage and it's basically just one of their £20 phones with a mono speaker, a few ports and no phone or battery. No iPod support is inexcusable at that price point (though it wouldn't be a major selling point for the device) and NO storage for podcasts or DAB (or even MW/LW)? No wonder it was buried alive.
That thing must cost practically nothing to make. Sell it for £30-£40 and they'd have a winner. They could even build some kind of marketplace around music sales to the device.... oh wait....
My coat's the one with the iPhone and N95 in the pockets. :-)
Reciva?
Good this it isn't Reciva internals. That would kill it utterly.
It might be OK for internet radio, but it's completely pants as a network media player. What would you think of a player that barfs if there's more than a few hundred tracks on your media server?
