Ocean Digital Portable Internet Wi-Fi/FM Radio with Bluetooth Speaker, Rechargeable Battery Compact Radio for Kitchen Garden (WR26)

This is an amazing, wonderful new kind of radio, an "internet radio", something that is unknown to most people. It is an advanced generation unit, surprisingly easy to use. Based on the quality, I am very confident in its reliability. For me, this radio is perfect for overnight listening to an enormous number of stations from all over the world. It is designed for home or office use, because it uses your wifi connection, not the airwaves. (Though it does pick up local FM stations also).I live in a small town with terrible radio reception. Only a couple of horrible local talk stations, and only a few FM music stations. This small, good looking portable internet radio has CHANGED MY LIFE. It connects automatically to thousands of the best stations in the USA and the world through "Skytune", an Ocean Digital website. You can set up to 100 "favorites" or presets, and you can even enter custom URLs for many stations that are not in Skytune. You can change the order of your favorites, or delete them.This is NOT a PC or a smartphone, it is a radio. Therefore, it has only a very small, black and white screen. The first time you use it you need to enter your wifi password, which is a bit slow without a keyboard. But once you have done this, it is easy to navigate the menus, choose stations, etc. Once you have your favorites set up, it is all a snap. But if you are uncomfortable with navigating a very small screen, or not good with your hands, a smartphone might be a better answer for you. I personally love this radio, because it is similar to the radios I've used my whole life.I find it to be surprisingly user friendly for its quite basic user interface. You can navigate to look for other stations while listening to the one you are on. The only tiny inconvenience so far is that to change the volume of the current station, I need to navigate back to it. But I am already used to doing this. A very reasonable price for a terrific gadget!

This Ocean Digital Internet radio is a mixed bag.Pros:Sound quality is excellent, especially for voice/talk. Very clear, bright sound that is easy to listen to.Operates on an internal lithium 18650 rechargeable battery that charges via a USB micro connector. Buttons are solid and positive.Display is small but readable.I have had no problems connecting to my router, or and maintaining connections throughout my home. As a general rule, I would say that if you can connect a cell phone or tablet to your WiFi from any given spot in your home, you should be able to also use this radio in that same spot without connection issues.You can connect directly to the radio using a web browser from your computer -- as long as the radio and computer are on the same network. Once connected you can manage stored favorites (up to 99). Optionally you can enter in the web address for stations that are not accessible via the Skytune database.Cons:The internal rechargeable battery is charged using a 5-volt USB wall charger that is NOT supplied with the radio. It does come with a charger cable, but you must supply the wall charger.The case is very lightweight and feels like rather cheap feeling plastic.The display is quite readable, but the backlight is on the dim side.Using the tiny display and on-board buttons to search for various stations works, but it's tedious and is not at all a pleasurable experience.WiFi works great, but is limited to 2.4Mhz connections. The radio will not see 5Mhz WiFi.General:Once connected to WiFi, you search for stations using the built-in Skytunes by searching for them using the radio's tiny display and buttons. Although this works, it's a bit of a tedious process due to the smallness of the display and the few buttons provided to control the process.The radio also offers FM reception, which works fine with stronger local stations but does not provide reliable reception on weaker FM stations. This radio also tunes DAB and DAB+, which are a digital, over-the-air radio service used in the EU, the UK, parts of Africa, Asia and Australia. DAB and DAB+ is NOT supported in the United States, Canada and Mexico which instead use the High Definition (HD) radio. DAB and HD Radio are NOT compatible.I've had this radio for just short time, but so far so good. I don't know how well it will hold up over time. I'll post an update down the road.Here is the update. Although this radio does work fine, I eventually opted to return this and purchase the Ocean Digital WR-23F which is essentially the same radio, but with a larger LCD color display and a few more control buttons. It has similar performance and is much easier to use.