Roberts SolarDAB Radio (Review)

I’m back in love with radio.

Although I have a radio in the car and another in the kitchen I have been re-enthused into actually listening to the good old radio over my iPod by the Roberts solarDAB. Maybe it’s the ease of use, maybe it’s the form factor, perhaps it’s just a really cool gadget.

I have another Roberts radio and respect their workmanship and heritage but since breaking the power adapter I have to keep recharging the hulking batteries every so often. This has made me conscious of how much I am using it and that when the batteries run down it’s at least 24 hours till I can listen again.

Another small bind is that it’s a standard analogue radio and I find myself having to adjust the aerial when moving from station to station, or if I move the radio, to get the best reception.

Enter my new purchase.. The Roberts solarDAB freeplay powered digital Radio.

I managed to pick one up from Currys in Milton Keynes. The manger gave me his own staff discount to see I left the store happy as I had originally gone in for a cheaper solar/wind-up radio, which was out of stock.

This is my first DAB radio (Digital Audio Broadcasting) as I have held off for a while, worrying that I may not be able to receive many of the channels.

Well I needn’t have worried. Straight out of the box I pressed the scan button and had 20 stations picked up and auto programmed into the dial.

The overall form factor is compact, 190mm(w) x 110mm(h) x 80mm(d), easy to move from one place to another and my particular model is white plastic with soft touch rubberised ends and controls.

It’s also available in black, pink, red or green, has a built in rechargeable battery pack and although has the solar panel on top It also has a mains lead which in my dark cottage is going to be a necessity in the winter months if I am to want to use it for any great period of time.

OK, lets look at some of the features.

Interestingly as this is intended to be a radio carried around inside and outside the home, the telescopic aerial is detachable and can be stowed in a little slot on the back. I also imagine this is pretty easy to replace should it be lost or broken. It is totally rubberised when closed and as yet, in my location, I haven’t noticed any need to have it fully extended.

It has an 80mm 1 watt speaker which is really quite good. I was a little shocked at the clarity when I first turned it on as it gives out much more than you would expect from a radio this size. As you would imagine, this to me is the most important detail here. The sound. It has more than enough volume for inside the house and I could see it seriously annoying fellow campers or neighbours should you want to take it out and about.

Speech is crisp and music is rich. I love the way that the display shows you the data rate in kbps for each station (i.e. TalkSport 128kbps and Classic a whopping 160kbps).

As this is meant to be a power efficient device I am not surprised to see the small display. It seems to have all that is needed though. Along with signal strength, station id  and selectable data such as time, frequency, network and data rate the display also shows the current battery power and a nifty little solar meter telling you in bars how much light the top mounted solar power is receiving.

At first glance I thought it was too small to be of any real use but it seems Roberts have done a good job at making this unit efficient.

According to Roberts if your bars are up to half way then the internal batteries are being assisted and you can expect about 27 hours before they go completely flat. If you have more than half the bars lit then you are running the radio from the photovoltaic cells and trickle charging the batteries too.

I was reluctant to leave the radio outside all day as being a typical English summer It was raining and although the unit looks pretty sealed, I was not sure how weather proof it was. For the few hours I did manage outside under the overcast sky I noticed no depletion on the battery meter.

For a longer test I left the radio on my dark cottage window ledge for a few hours and moved it around the home using it continually at a decent volume. With the little sun it received through my little windows it ran for over 20 hours before giving up the ghost. The solar panel is really quite sensitive and I could see the radio running continuously should you leave it in a greenhouse. I may well just try that.. I just need a greenhouse.

On the back of the radio is a power port for the 9.5 volt adapter, a headphone socket and the really welcome addition of a line in port. In the not to distant future when the new family of super sensitive photovoltaic cells on the market out I would love to see devices like this fitted with an additional power output port, so on particularly sunny days you can also charge your other devices i.e. phones, ipods etc.

That said, it feels great knowing that should I ever find myself in the gutter, batteries are not one of the expenses I will have to worry about when rocking out in my cardboard box.

As far as cost goes, I am more than happy with this radio, but then I didn’t pay full whack for it. I think £70 is a little expensive, but imagine it won’t be at that price for long. We should not be made to pay a premium for tech just because it is ‘Green’. You do pay a little extra for Roberts products and normally it is because you are buying a wood and leather, chic, retro unit crammed with top components. Yes this does look a little like a toy but it feels well made, is easy to clean if dropped whilst gardening and is easy to operate.

Regarding the tech behind it. I could probably knock up a solar powered dab radio with an existing cheaper model and a small panel from Maplin but it would be a botch job and I feel the more solar devices we see being offered the better. Going into the electrical store and seeing solar devices on the shelf gave me hope. I feel a little sick inside every time I throw away a handful of batteries and feel we should be way more advanced in this day and age.

We all need solar power and radio is bloody great entertainment but don’t buy this because you think it looks cool. Buy this because you need a new radio, you have good digital reception and you want one that can recharge itself naturally.. And when the rechargeable batteries have done their thousand cycles it will still work in sunlight without them!

This I hope is just the beginning. If I made a solar powered DAB radio, I would want it firmware upgradable (to be ready for DAB+).. I would like it to have FM as a back up, an SD card slot for playing mp3’s and recording radio through, a lead to power as well as play my ipod and as I said before, a socket through which I could use the solar panel to charge other devices.

But that’s just me. I always want more.

Conclusion.

It’s the best solar powered radio I have seen on the market at the moment. Providing you have decent digital reception where you are (check this site) and can afford around £70.. it’s a good buy.

(This is an independent review and my own personal opinion I am in now way connected to Roberts and have no advertisements supporting this website. If you enjoy reading OurManInside.com please feel free to show your support by clicking this link)

Less is more: The 12 second blog killer

I am finding it easier and easier to just click record and speak my thoughts into some form or video blogging application.

It all began with Seesmic and now in addition (especially when wanting to cross post and use multimedia) I also use Phreadz. For live streaming (in my opinion), there is still only Qik.

The more I used these places the more I noticed a dip in my frequency to blog and podcast. It’s just too easy. If I have a question, thought, idea or master plan I would like to bounce off someone, I just press a button, speak my mind and before I have time to log out, I have an inbox full of answers replies and comments.

Coupled with the bind it can sometimes be to actually write a blog post and I am amazed these pages ever change.

Don’t get me wrong.. I love this Wordpress template. It has enabled me to cram all kinds of content onto the front page of my blog. It’s well laid out and easy to use.

Many of the settings lie dormant beneath the surface as I don’t feel the need to use all the whistles and bells at my disposal.

I love the integration of the images to highlight the articles on the front page but if I originally thought I would take my time to grow into this blog template, I am now finding that I’m taking too much time to do each blog. As a result I write less as I can’t just ‘bang out’ an idea and make it live. Not like I can when posting a video.

Just as I have massively reduced the production time on my podcasts by keeping it simple, maybe I can do the same here? Instead of having to upload two new and unique graphics every time I do a new blog, I think if I already have a selection of stock avatar-type images to link to on my server I am more likely to want to drop little ditties, thoughts and ideas onto a web page.

Sometimes I feel you have to worry less about how it looks in order to get the content out there. I guess I realized this a while ago. Maybe I just didn’t want to let go of my initial way of doing things.

Our Man Inside on 12seconds.tv
Now with the emergence if 12 seconds all hell has broken loose in my video blogging world. I’m not sure what it is that I find compelling.. Perhaps it’s fitting stuff within the time constraints.. Maybe it’s the distillation of peoples humour and the visual snippets of their lives? It’s all so easy to digest in small bitesize chunks without feeling that you should be doing something else.

No one rambles. There is no feeling of time-suck, your life ebbing away as you wait for someone to make their point. I guess this sounds selfish but when you surround yourself with creative minds, absorbing their media all day, everyday, be it blogs, podcasts or videos, you sometimes just want a mini media snack, not a full blown mind meal. If you do not limit the time you put aside to take all of this media in.. before you know it, the day has gone and you are wishing you turned off hours ago.

I don’t get that with 12 seconds, at least not at the moment.. Who knows where it will go. I guess I kind of like it being a different beast to the other places I frequent. If I want threaded conversation (..and i do.. often) I have those places. If I want a 12 second stand alone snippit.. it’s perfect.

Maybe we will soon see replies and threading, perhaps it will become more of a video-Plurk rather than a video-Twitter.

Part of me hopes not. Comments are enough for me right now and I think I would like to see 12seconds evolve along it’s own pedigree, not cross breed into another social media mongrel.

Only time will tell.

Episode 44 - Kiss Privacy Goodbye

Back on June the 25th, for the second year running myself and Dr John Perivolaris, visited George Orwell’s grave for his birthday.

This year we were accompanied by Phil Campbell and Brian Jones and as we picnicked in honour of Eric Arthur Blair, we also discussed our ever diminishing civil liberties, asking what is public and wondering If George Orwell could ever have known that it would not be the tyranny of socialism but the triumph of capitalism which is making us kiss our privacy goodbye?

If you have not subscribed to the podcast (free) in Itunes already, you can listen to the mp3 here

And if you would like a visual referance to the day, check out these great little films of the day made by  Phil Campbell .. This one in HD and this one shot on the Flip Ultra

Thanks for stopping by.

Phreadz and the New Media Expo

I was having a quiet night in on the net, flitting from one platform to another, posting a video here and a tweet there.

The chatter in the networks was all about the upcoming New Media Expo in Las Vegas. Having missed out on the Boston Podcamp while on a photo assignment I felt a pang of longing and posted this video..

Apparently I was not clutching at straws.. an hour later I was looking at an email from an anonymous donor pledging me the ticket money to the Vegas NME, providing I did what I said I was going to do, that is, utilise Phreadz in the perfect environment and demonstrate it’s potential.

Apparently there are some serious lurkers out there that really want Phreadz to be pushed more on the international tech circuit..

For me it’s a no-brainer. I have been a Phreadz Phanboy since February 08 It is the only thing on the web that does what it does.

Since I lost my Video blogging cherry to Seesmic I have dabbled in all kinds of online video platforms. Each have their own niches. If i want a large unknown mystery audience I post to seesmic. You never know what you may get back. If i am feeling spontaneous and creative i may blurt out a few 12 second video ditties on 12Seconds.tv

The thing that attracts me to Phreadz right now is its seemingly unlimited ability to show off any content I throw at it. If I want to post video, audio, photos, text links or even a slideshow presentation it will happily suck it all up in just about any format I can chuck at it. It can either be uploaded into the main time line or into one of the many custom channels that have been made.

Recently my very own Geeknbury festival had its own channel. I was really chuffed with this and the channel allowed this small geek festival to exist outside of the field it was born in and be enjoyed internationally. It even had its own musical continuation in the shape of a gig by Steve Lawson and Lobelia played and streamed from their very own living room right into the Geeknbury channel.

I don’t even need to sit here on my minimal countryside bandwidth waiting for files to upload as I can cross post with URLs from countless other video platforms including two of my favorites, Qik and Blip.

Where I feel most at home though is within the virtually instantaneous video conversations occurring across all channels, from either mobile or off my laptop.

Although still in a closed beta (soon to open wider, I hear), Phreadz founder Kosso, has not only concentrated on content but he has ensured community still plays a major part in Phreadz. Occasionally new channels appear out of the blue and, as users, we all quickly embrace another place we can express ourselves. After all, it is still the user who makes the content in Phreadz and because of this the conversations are always rich. Channels have allowed any exasperated rant or heartfelt tale to live side by side without content clashing, or meaning and context getting lost in the ever increasing flow of new and interesting dialogue.

One place on Phreadz I’ll be sure to spend some time next week will be the New Media Expo Channel, created as an experiment to cover The New Media Expo hosted in Las Vegas by brothers Tim and Emile Bouquin.

So although I will be in the channel, thanks to my mysterious ‘Angel’,  I will also actually be in Las Vegas, creating content, networking and showing anyone that loves new media an innovative tool that has not only indirectly given me this opportunity but that also inspires, homes and houses so much of my online existence.

The New Media Expo Channel is at http://newmediaexpo.phreadz.com and is open for all to see.

If you want to know more about Phreadz and want to join in with the beta testers, why not drop the site an email HERE

If you are an investor, contact the site as it is ripe and ready to take the net by storm, Kosso just needs smart folk with money.

And if you really want to help out right now.. make a donation to the chip-in on the front page here.. It’s worth it.

I am off to pack and charge geek stuff.. If you are going to the NME in Vegas let’s connect on Twitter

UPDATE: Anyone in Vegas sending New Media Expo content to nme@phreadz.com automatically gets an account!!