Are You Receiving?
It's better news when it comes to linear radio. Radio is really the raison d'être of the device, and does a nice job of integrating FM analogue and Internet radio seamlessly. You merely need to press a station to add it to the favourites list. The box has a daunting built-in directory of net radio stations - with some curious popular omissions. I wasn't able to find WFMU in the list.
Radio favourites show both FM and Internet stations
When searching for podcasts or Internet radio stations, you can enter the address manually - Nokia here offers you an onscreen keyboard, laid out in Alphanumeric (rather than Qwerty) sequence. It's pretty tedious, but you shouldn't have to do it too often, in theory.
Accessing home media servers is snappy
In a nice touch, the device has a History list, so you can browse through the stations and podcasts you have listened to. This proved to be very useful.
External sources are lumped in the curious Jukebox top-level menu.
Jukebox provides access to Aux in, USB, and home media servers
As you might expect, Apple's iPhone isn't a supported USB device, and you'd be daft to expect Nokia to provide an iPod/iPhone dock. Still, an iPhone will happily pipe in sound from the Aux input. The box had no problem finding music shared through Windows Media Center over UPnP. It was more problematic on the Mac. NMH wouldn't work with Yazsoft's Playback and Allegro Media Server, but played very nicely with the Twonky Media Server.
Next page: Sound, Ergonomics and Extras
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?
