There aren’t too many people out there who’d want a dedicated DAB+ radio that did nothing other than receive digital radio broadcasts. But a combo device like Kogan’s that supports Internet and FM radio, plus has an iPod dock built in and streams your music collection over Wi-Fi? That’s a product people might want to buy…
Price: $199
Verdict: Kogan’s whole raison d’être is to offer products at a super competitive price by cutting out the middle man. At $199, the Kogan digital internet radio doesn’t necessarily have a huge price advantage over other devices on the market, but it is fully featured and sounds pretty damned good.
At first glance, there seems to be way too many buttons on the front of the radio, but after using the speaker for a few weeks I actually used all of them. The DAB+ function are dead easy to set up and choosing a channel is a breeze. Internet radio is just as easy, although entering in your wireless password using only the four way navigation buttons can be a bit painstaking. You can directly access a whole range of podcasts directly from the device, but sadly they seem to only be of an international flavour – at least, my favourite local podcasts seemed to be missing.
With digital radio, FM radio is dead to me, so I didn’t even bothe checking it out. Internet radio was a bit hit and miss – some channels played back fine, others refused to load, but that could be a problem with the station rather than the device. Unlike the podcasts, there’s a really good selection of Australian Internet radio stations available.
Sound quality was pretty impressive. With two speakers and a front tweeter, you get a really full sound with a good range. Cranking the volume up, there’s only a small amount of distortion, which is a pleasant surprise.
The only real problem with the device is that despite the fact Kogan advertises the radio works with iPhone, plugging in an iPhone 4 gives a message that it is not actually designed to work with iPhone. You can still get it to play music my using the iPhone to control your music selection, but track info isn’t displayed on the radio’s screen. It does charge the iPhone though, which is more than some iPod docks.
For $200, it’s definitely an investment. But given the versatility and sound performance, it looks like a worthwhile one.
[Kogan]
agi
Friday, September 10, 2010 at 5:22 PMBought this one a couple of weeks back, and so far its been great.
Cant figure out how to favorite internet stations, but the sound quality and the streaming has been flawless so far.
Tweak
Friday, September 10, 2010 at 6:22 PMIts a little over $215 if you account for postage
Still not a bad looking unit, considering most digital radios look plastic fantastic or a 1940′s dropout
StevoTheDevo
Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 8:15 AMWhy are DAB+ radio’s so damn expensive? Surely they cost no more than an mp3 player to make?
Nodeity
Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 8:44 AMLiving in Toowoomba where the radio signal strength and the quality of the stations are crap, I’d love something like this that was also an alarm clock,… Mmmm, Yeah.
Denis Cowcill
Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 10:05 AMFM radio is far from dead and still has superior sound quality to the restricted bandwidth the stations are actually using. Sure if they used more bandwidth they could be good quality, but most of them split the bandwidth so they can broadcast 2 stations and other information (song titles, weather, news etc.)
Max
Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 1:40 PMLooged onto Kogan on the day it was down at $149.
Pulled the trigger and am very happy with this purchase. The web portal makes it easy to choose and organise your internet stations.
@Stevothedevo the price might be a refection of economies of scale. Also I beleive this kogan unit uses a venice module from frontier-silicon.com – a lot more complex than an mp3 player.
A great replacement and improvement on my old clock radio.