Pure One Mi portable DAB/FM radio
Move with the music
Review The traditional battery powered transistor FM radio still takes some beating when it comes to listening in places like the bathroom or garden shed, if that’s where you choose to spend any length of time. Indeed, Pure had a big success with its £45 palm-sized One Mini so it has sliced a few millimetres from that model, shrunk the name to Mi and knocked £10 off the price.
Back to basics: Pure's One Mi
This compact radio is available in black or white and includes an FM tuner as well as DAB, DAB+ and DMB. Like a mobile phone, the mains adapter cable plugs into the radio’s mini USB port although I found that a USB lead running directly from a computer would also power it.
For battery use it only takes the optional A1 ChargePAK. This is the smallest and, at £17.49, the cheapest of Pure’s add-on rechargeable batteries, but it adds 50 per cent to the price of the radio just to unleash it from a wall socket.
Obviously such a tiny radio can’t support a huge antenna, and DAB reception occasionally drops into digital burbling compared to bigger radios in the same location. Even so, the Pure One Mi’s reception performance didn’t turn out to be too much of a problem.
Optional battery provides portability but costs half as much as the radio
You can store eight presets for both DAB and FM. The LCD display shows extra text information for analogue or digital stations, where used. It is bijou, though, so it’s a choice between station name or supplementary data. Also, the One Mi lacks a handy button to toggle between these modes, so you have to delve into the menu to change it.
Next page: Unplugged
COMMENTS
Doesn't take AAs?
What are they *on*? For an ostensibly portable device, wouldn't it make far more sense to use batteries that you can, you know, actually buy in shops? That way if I'm on holiday and it starts to go flat I can plonk a couple of cheap AAs in it and continue to use the radio, rather than having to buy a 17 quid battery by mail order *in advance*. It's a totally bizarre design decision.
Also, I believe that's a micro USB socket, not a mini.
No excuse
for proprietry batteries in a radio. They should run off AAs or similar.
Battery life
19 hours of battery life is not reasonable. A couple of hours a day for a year with a two rechargeable AA's is reasonable for a portable FM radio.
Sorry, DAB is still far too power-hungry and the radio itself is more than double the cost of a portable FM radio. There is no point in producing a DAB radio like this when the competition is so much better in every respect - especially if the extras DAB provides, on screen info and a clear signal, are not there.
It's like trying to sell a mirror encrusted, smoke emitting, sewing machine engined moped to a cyclist.
"you can’t expect a lot of refinement on a digital radio at this price"?
My god.. it's over 50 quid (17 quid for a battery compartment? WTF?). I expect a *lot* of refinement on a radio at that price.
Being able to stream half a dozen radio channels encoded at below MP3 standard bitrates doesn't justify paying ten times the price.. not even close. You can get wifi internet radios with bags of features for the same money.
seems a fair review to me
"This is a convenient portable rather than a gutsy boombox, so DAB and FM are equal performers at this scale; and if your favourite stations are digital-only, then you’ll at least get to hear them in more diverse locations."
Thanks for not going down the tediously predictable "DAB sounds worse than FM" route. I just wish they'd turn the power up a bit on DAB so indoor coverage is free of boiling mud for most people.
Having said that I tend to use my mobile (SE K750i or HTC Wildfire) with headphones for most listening round the house these days, the latter usually streaming via WiFi rather than FM.
