LA Times Sunday Business Section

[ronkaram]

An article about a Sanyo internet radio. I didn't know anything like this exists. The journalist listens to a classical station in Budapest. Now if they can only find one that would work in your car, I could enjoy listening while driving, I could listen to the dance stations I listen to on my computer. I've went from listening in my car almost 100% of the time down to about 10%.

 

[LA_Guy]

RCA has one that's great and sells for under 100 dollars: The RIR200. It's made by Audiovox and is also marketed under the Audiovox and Acoustic Research brands.

It has AM, Stereo FM, Stereo Internet radio (including thousands of preset stations and a personalized portal for you to set your own favorite stations), Slacker Radio, the ability to play audio files off a USB drive, the ability to record and play audio from its 512 megs of internal memory, a self setting 'atomic' digital clock (sets off of the Internet), a full featured alarm clock, Weatherbug personalized weather forecasts-including cut ins to the audio during weather emergencies (they actually use text to speech for this-and it comes with a free 4 year Weatherbug subscription!), WIFI or wired hook up to your network, a headphone/line out jack and battery backup for the clock.

Unfortunately, they are out of stock everywhere-mine is on order. My brother got one and he says it's the coolest radio he's ever had, and sounds pretty darn good too!

There is also an RIR205 that comes with a wireless access point for around 150 dollars. Sears sells this one.

For car usage there's Slacker's portable Internet thingy. You can set the genre of music (there are hundreds of formats, or you can design your own station) you want and it downloads a good playlist of music to its internal 8 GB of memory. Whenever you are withinin range of a wireless access point it automatically updates the playlist seamlessly in the background. This means that you can hook it to your car stereo on the way to work in the morning, then let it update during the day and have a completely different song set for the drive home. You can also use up to half of the 8 gb memory to download and play your own music.

Woot.com had it on sale last week for 75 dollars shipped.

 

[jonbruce]

Blaupunkt has announced a partnership with MiRoamer to produce 2 models of in-dash car radios that will receive internet stations and AM/FM. No price was listed on the press release I got last week.