Set up and ease of use
We've talked about initial impressions of the look and feel but what's no less important is the ease of use - something that the company says the product has in abundance. Our initial take on ease of use was good but once we delved a little deeper, we were less impressed.
It's certainly true, though, that the initial DAB set up is easy. The first time the radio's turned on in DAB mode, it auto scans for available stations – after which you can move from one station to another by rotating the TUNE knob left or right. However, there's no way to auto-tune the five possible DAB station presets. Fortunately, it is easy to set up the presets manually. You simply access the desired station by rotating the TUNE knob and then press and hold the required preset button for five seconds.
Selecting any DAB radio station also automatically sets the clock - date as well as time. That's just as well, because there's no backup battery for the clock, so settings are lost if the rechargeable battery cluster goes flat.
If you happen to be in an area (or part of the building) where there's no DAB reception - and where you'll end up having to listen only to FM - it's possible to set the clock manually by holding down the SETUP button for two seconds and then turning the TUNE knob.
The five preset buttons can be used for FM stations, too, but in FM mode there is neither auto tuning nor any auto-scan option. Instead, you can move up the frequency range from one strong station to the next by momentarily pressing the Auto Tune button.
Oddly, though, and rather irritatingly, there's no option to move down the FM frequency range in the same way. So, you either have to jump from station to station all the way up to the top of the frequency range, then back to the bottom, or twiddle the TUNE knob. This moves down the frequency range if turned anti-clockwise - and up if turned clockwise - but changes the frequency only in tiny, 0.1MHz steps, so is a drag to use.
In total, as you'll have figured, there are 10 presets and that's rather fewer than you might expect for a radio priced at a fraction under £200. On the up side, the radio has a count-down cooking timer - sensible for a kitchen model - plus alarm, snooze and sleep functions so that it can double as a bedside clock-radio-alarm.
Getting to the place where the timers - cooking, alarm, snooze and sleep - are adjusted is a bit of a convoluted business but not as convoluted as actually carrying out the changes. The initial selection step involves holding down the SETUP button for two seconds, rotating the TUNE button until the required timer hoves into view on the LCD panel and then pushing down on the TUNE button. At that point, it's possible to start adjusting the clock settings for the chosen timer.
For the cooking timer, that means twiddling the TUNE knob to cycle around the five preset values - five/10/30 minutes and two/12 hours - until the required one appears on the LCD, pushing the TUNE knob to make the selection, turning the TUNE knob to set a count-down timer delay greater or less than the preset, then pressing it once again to confirm the selection.
The buzzer that sounds when the cooking time is up has to be turned off by pressing the Standby button on top of the radio. That didn't strike us as overly intuitive and is another consequence of having a limited number of dedicated function buttons and moving so many setting selections over onto the TUNE button.
Set up is similar for the alarm. The first selection is for the time, the next is for once/daily/weekend-only and the last is for buzzer/radio. Not having discrete buttons for making these choices means there's again much pressing and rotating of the TUNE knob while keeping an eye on the LCD.
There's also no dedicated snooze button, so the user needs to press the Standby button to activate the snooze function once the alarm sounds. Choosing beforehand how long the radio will stay off for is carried out via menu settings shown on the LCD and accessed from the TUNE knob - twiddle, press, twiddle, press...
The sleep-mode delay - the time after which the radio turns off when you're in bed - again uses the TUNE-knob menu and LCD and offers a range of delays from one minute to 90. On our pre-production model, though, sleep mode didn't work - its menu didn't even include an option to turn it on - and so, not surprisingly, the LCD didn't put up an "S", as it's supposed to, to show that sleep mode has been selected.
What the TUNE-knob menu also let's you do - in theory, at least - is make some quite sophisticated changes to the order of DAB stations that you cycle through when turning the TUNE knob. Trouble is, we hit two problems.
The first was that the author of the manual had clearly been unable to understand all of these well enough to explain them clearly. The other was that they just didn't work on our pre-production sample - so we have some sympathy with the manual's author who presumably also had hands on with an early model.
As best as we can make out, though, what you are supposed to be able to do is order the stations alphabetically; by their multiplex (so, for instance, all BBC stations would be grouped together); have the last 10 stations you accessed displayed one after the other; or choose which 10 stations will be displayed one after the other. There's a fifth option as well - called Active Station - but try as we might, we couldn't figure out what it was meant to do and we weren't helped by the fact that none of the five options seemed to work.
