8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Good design, but two big flaws
Date of Review: Sep 12, 2006
The Bottom Line: Great looking, great design, good features. Highly recommended but display may be too bright for some.
Bought this for my wife as a gift. Her ipod is never charged and this looked like an elegant way to both keep the ipod charged, and allow her to listen to books and subscription programs while she sits in bed.And for this it's absolutely brilliant!
This is the only ipod clock radio I've seen in a sea of ipod speaker-docks.
It's about standard size for a clock radio and comes with shims so it fits most ipods after a little setup. My wife isn't technically savvy and doesn't read manuals and she had the thing set up in a minute. Time comes preset at the factory, just select a timezone!
Sound is certainly above average for a clock radio, but maybe I'm just spoiled by the ipod source quality which is better than radio. The unit also sports a PLL digital FM tuner which is nicer than the old dials still popular on alot of clock radios! Supposedly it has some intuitive "automatic frequency control" to find the best signal...it "fine-tunes" itself if that station isn't dead on. Either way, the one time we used it it sounded great.
Buttons on top of the radio make navigating the ipod easy, and there's an optional remote available...an excellent feature!
Big buttons on top for volume and program advance, and a typical snooze bar. All in all it's very well laid out. Has a sleep timer and a sleep to ipod feature that slowly lowers the volume(haven't even tried). I'm very happy with the purchase...except for two things!
BRIGHT! The clock on this clock radio is so incredibly bright! The first night we had it, it was on it's brightest setting and you could literally read by the thing! After finding the dimming contol, we've gotten it down to only bright. I don't know how something like this gets out of testing without this annoying flaw being recognized. On the dimmest setting I could read this clock from 30 feet away. I've heard of people putting window tinting over the display, I think Ihome should offer this as a free gift to owners of this product!
Slightly less annoying is the "wake to music" feature. I usually wake with the "pop" of the speakers coming on and the faint music from the speakers, before you can reach the snooze button it's absolutely blaring! It would be nice if the volume increased slowly over, say, a minute instead of going from silent to full volume in 5 seconds. I don't care what lilting ditty you've chosen to wake up to, you don't want to hear it at full volume in your ear at 6 am.
These two flaws aside, this is a fantastic device and I can't really think of any improvements! It really fits the bill for us, providing a constantly charged ipod, and a huge source of music to relax with.
