Sound, Ergonomics and Extras
Although it's a humble mono system, it pumps out a decent room-filling sound from its 10W speaker. That's largely down to the deep bass reflex tube at the rear, looking ominously like an exhaust pipe. It does such a good job you might consider the output a little bass-heavy when placed against wall.
The Music centre has a dedicated power switch. The front panel power switch will activate the standby display - a fairly bright affair which can't be dimmed, with a large clock.
The very useful History list remembers your choices
It's one of the best outputs considering the price and output power on offer here. It's no match for, say, the 50W of bass and 50W of tweeters you'll find in Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelin - but that's three times the price, and you get what you pay for. I was astonished, and chuffed, to find RCA and digital S-video outputs though.
Overall the sound is considerably better than the DAB kitchen top radio many of us have in the corner.
However, this is very much a 1.0 product, with the sort of rough edges one would expect to be improved in a version 2.0. The biggest culprit is the sluggish scrolling while streaming net radio, which should have been addressed in the lab, but it isn't a show stopper. Turn off the streaming, and it scrolls quickly or at an acceptable speed.
The media player features artwork
The discovery of net radio stations and podcasts is also very much 1.0-ish and could also have been improved. A little storage for podcasts would have helped, along with a few touches such as a backlit remote.
Next page: Net Gain?
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?
