Product Reviews

You may already listen to Internet radio via iTunes and sites such as live365.com, but if you want the convenience of listening anywhere in the house or better reproduction than from a typical MacBook then Revo's Blik radio looks promising.

This is one of the first of a new breed of standalone Internet radio, requiring only a wifi connection to access the music.

Looking like a large chunk of dark chocolate (white chocolate if you choose the alternative colour scheme), the Blik is wifi-enabled out of the box. There's a decent-size speaker facing upwards under its heavily patterned top surface and next to this, a pad of 23 control buttons. In the front face there's a two-line, white-on-black, backlit LCD display that shows both the station you're tuned to and status and instruction messages when retuning.

The Blik's controls enable flicking between stations, setting the in-built alarms and assigning your favourite channels to the eight presets (not a lot given that there are more than 10,500 channels to choose from). To cope with the huge range, the Blik sorts them by country and genre so for example, you can pick folk stations from Afghanistan

Once you accept your chosen network, it logs on to the Reciva Internet Radio gateway at reciva.com to stream all the available channels.

Sound quality is very good, well up to the portable radio standards you'd expect from Roberts or Pure. Although it's mono only, audio is clear and for the size of radio, it has a good frequency range. It's perhaps a little light in the bass registers but this is mainly a function of the case dimensions.There's an M-Port socket at the back, so you can use the Blik's amplifier and speaker to play back from an iPod or other media player, or as an external sound system for your Mac.

There's also a headphone jack for private listening and a pair of RCA jacks for connecting to an external sound system.

The only real gripe we have is putting the controls and display on different surfaces of the radio. You have to work the Blik at a particular angle to see both easily and it makes it awkward to use, for instance, as a bedside radio. A supplied, small remote control gets over the problem but the glitch could have been designed out from scratch. Another remote to add to the typical domestic clutch isn't ideal.

For a further outlay of £50, you can have the Blik with added DAB and DAB+ reception as well as Internet and FM, so giving you a complete digital and analogue radio receiver.

Even as it stands, however, the £100 Blik is an exceptionally versatile standalone unit, offering quality radio reproduction. We'd like a few more presets, though.