I am incredibly pleased with my Revi Pico RadioStation Internet radio. It’s easy to use and has a rechargeable battery so I can use it much like a regular portable radio. I wanted to have more English around the apartment so Liam hears more and to stop my vocabulary from degrading to the international English that I use in Munich if not speaking German.
Setting up the connection to my WPA2 wireless network was perfectly simple. I just chose the network then entered the pass phrase and it connected. Choosing radio stations is easy, by location, genre or search, with popular stations in “highlights” lists. When turned on it starts playing whatever station it was playing when turned off.
It gets the list of radio stations from wifiradio-frontier.com. I wish that we had access to a list like that on the Linux desktop, for instance in Rhythmbox. The website lets you set up groups of favorite stations, which then appear in the device’s UI. That’s rather clunky – for instance, I can’t correct the spelling of my “Scotlland” group without completely recreating the group. Likewise, I can’t move stations between groups. Obviously I’m concerned that the website might disappear one day, orphaning the device, but I expect the device to be technologically outdated before that happens.
The UI is very good, only limited by the two-line text display and the slow automatic horizontal scrolling. That’s particularly noticeable when choosing podcast episodes, which all tend to have the same long prefix in their titles. It would also be nice if it played podcast episodes sequentially instead of repeating the same episode. But that’s not the primary purpose of the device.
The company is based in Lanark, Scotland, though they manufacture in China. My RadioStation’s serial number of 1005 is surprisingly low.
mm, does it do UPnP A/V? Can it be MediaRenderer? MediaServer?
Does it have S/P-DIF out?
Waldo, it does some kind of Media Server sharing thing. It’s one of its “mode”s. I don’t know exactly what it uses. The manual
http://www.revo.co.uk/downloads/Pico_RadioStation_Manual.pdf
suggests that it just uses CIFS (same as SMB?) shared folders from Windows
And it does seem to have co-axial outputs for connecting to a Hi-Fi, though the manual calls them “Stereo RCA”. I don’t speak these acronyms.
Ah, actually the manual says it does do UPnP.
Hi,
a few questions for my better understanding – I am interested in buying a Net-Radio.
1) DAB is dead, isn’t it?
2) Is there a device there you can actually login into an change the program list?
3) The IR 715 (muvid) is also interesting. But the display is pretty bad.
Dan
> 1) DAB is dead, isn’t it?
I don’t know. I don’t really care. It does me no harm to have that feature. It does give us clear reception of many local radio stations here in Munich.
> 2) Is there a device there you can actually login into an change the program list?
You can change your favorites via the website, and add stations there too.
I just tried the Pico RadioStation’s Shared Media feature, with Rhythmbox on Ubuntu Jaunty. It works, which is a nice surprise. Rhythmbox even works now with my PS3, which is even more unexpected.