Morphy Richards Internet (27025) DAB Radio Reviews

I made the mistake of mentioning to my mum that I wanted a gadget for Christmas. The sort of thing I would normally spend hours researching online before buying.

To her credit, I received exactly what I wanted - an Internet radio. Certainly, my wife wouldn't have attempted to even shop for such a frightening sounding object, but we digress.

Out of the box, the radio feels reassuringly heavy and looks suitably "tech". It's from here, however, that things go more or less downhill.

For some reason, the set up refused to work with my 64bit WEP wireless network. I have ended up disabling WEP and relying instead on MAC address filtering. Not a problem for us, as we live in a rural location and the signal doesn't go further than our 2 feet thick stone walls in any case.

Once connected, there are several menus allowing you to choose local media (from the SD Card slot), media shares (more on this later) and Internet radio. There's a couple of options for upnp servers etc. too.

The main reason for buying this type of radio is listening to stations available on the Internet. Advertised as 4000+ being ready to listen to; a figure that sounds about right.

Initially, you have a choice of "Genre" or "Location" to locate your desired station. A month or so after receiving the radio I still don't tire of looking for stations in remote or little heard of countries; there is something of the short wave radio about this. It reminds me of using my uncle's enormous short wave contraption many years ago and listening to what I imagined was the voice of Russian spies crackling over the air waves.

Anyway, using this menu - operated by a rotary dial that you click in to select - it's relatively easy to tune in to anything from BBC Radio 4 to PlanetRock to Greek Dance radio. Full marks for that then.

Now comes the major problem with the set. It is simply too quiet. The BBC are a good example of this as their stations are very quiet when compared to many other stations (but not all by a long chalk). Even at full volume, it is too quiet to hear in the next room with a door left ajar between.

If you like your music with enough volume to be heard over steaming pans and running taps, you can forget it (I have mine in the kitchen in case you were wondering...).

I have connected a couple of old (large) PC speakers to the external jack and therefore the radio plus these speakers takes up 2 plug sockets and about the same surface area of an old record player.

The second major problem is the networking technology. I mentioned before problems getting the radio to work on my wireless network; a network I can connect anything else to with ease - a Pinnacle media server; PDAs, laptops etc. For some reason it simply refuses to "see" any shared folders on the network too.

This is despite following instructions on the Reciva site to the letter (Reciva is the technology used in the radio) and going so far as to disable all firewalls and share every drive on my main PC - just in case.

Inexplicably, the radio is advertised as having a USB port, but the moving the rubber cover aside reveals a blank space. No matter, as I had not intended to use this anyway but I found it indicative of a product pushed out the door by Morphy Richards before development had finished (for the Christmas market maybe).

All in all, there are too many annoying niggles and major flaws to raise this radio into even "average" territory. It fails in the basic purpose of a radio, in allowing me to listen to music where I want to in the house - even discounting the network problems it simply is not loud enough. To illustrate this, I have just unplugged my extension speakers, tuned into BBC Radio 2, turned the volume up to full and walked out of the kitchen. On closing the glass door I simply can't make out even if it is music or talking on the radio - and my chair is less than 10 yards away.

Oh and despite what the "box" says, there are only 6 presets which is simply inadequate for a radio with access to over 4,000 stations.

My verdict? Avoid this radio.