Logitech UE Smart Radio Review

If at any point in your life you have been a music lover, if you are a music lover, if you want to be a music lover, you need the UE Smart Radio in your life. Replacing that John Cusack style Boombox? Get the UE Smart Radio. Looking for a really nice wedding gift (we received a Bose nine years ago)? Get the UE Smart Radio. Want to broaden your musical tastes? Get the UE Smart Radio. Sending your kid off to college? Get them the UE Smart Radio, only kidding, get them a year's supply of Ramen Noodles and get yourself the UE Smart Radio for the gym/craft room/cinema you just installed in their room.

Since it came out in September I have had the chance to spend some time listening to the Logitech UE Smart Radio. Much like the Squeezebox Touch recently reviewed on GeekMom, the Smart Radio uses your home Wi-Fi to combine all of your sources of music, be it internet radio, programs like Pandora, or your own files, through a single interface. The 2.4 inch LCD screen displays art, track, and station information, and you are able to pre-set your frequently played stations. As with the Squeezebox series, you can still get an app for your iPhone or Tablet by which you can control the device, but the Smart Radio does have a few extra draws, on the Touch that I have been using up to this point. It has a fully rechargeable battery pack that will allow for an average six hours of listening anywhere you can get WiFi. This has proven perfect for my husband in the garage or attic, where wall sockets are generally limited to lighting and tools. It also proved a fantastic addition to my toddler's birthday party in our garden, though most people were sick of listening to Skinnamarink by the end of the day. As a pseudo-audiophile, that is to say someone who loves music but via the cheapest option, the UE Smart Radio gives the most bang for your buck. It does so primarily by having built in speakers by Ultimate Ears, a fantastic sound for those of us who do not speak the language of the sub-woofer.

Technically speaking, the UE Smart Radio keeps up Logitech's Tardis-like standards of providing astounding quality in a small space:

• 0.75-inch high-definition, soft-dome tweeter and 3-inch high-power, long-throw woofer
• Bi-amplified class D design with digital electronic crossover
• Line-in via 3.5 mm stereo jack
• Built-in 802.11g (802.11b compatible) wireless
• Dimensions (H x W x D): 130 mm x 220 mm x 128 mm (from front edge of knob to peak of curve on back surface)

In addition to the features I have become accustomed to on my Squeezebox Touch, the UE Smart Radio takes on some classic tools such as six preset buttons which allow instant access to your favorite stations or playlists, and an alarm clock.

The system requirements are pretty basic:

• Broadband Internet connection (Ethernet or wireless home network)
• To play music stored on your computer:
  • Windows® XP, Windows 7 and later (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Mac OS® X 10.5 and later
  • 256 MB RAM and 80 MB available hard disk space
• The mobile app works with:
  • iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 4.2 and later
  • Android devices running Android 2.2 and later with Wi-Fi enabled

It's amazing how accustomed I have become to touch screen technology; between an iPhone, iPad, and the Squeezebox Touch, my life is full of instant gratification. I was therefore a bit concerned when I set up the UE Smart Radio, as it felt like I was taking a step backwards. You use one button to skip, a different button to move ahead and a different button to move back, ugh! After a month's use, I do still occasionally have a Homer Simpson moment and touch the screen, but those moments are becoming fewer and further apart. I believed that it was this feature that would ensure my preference for the Touch, but I am 100% sold on the UE Smartradio despite having to scroll my way through the alphabet when creating a new station on Pandora!

Some things haven't changed from the Squeezebox series. I still find that I am able to search for music that I would never bother listening to using my computer's browser. I am able to access local radio stations online without worrying about frequency. World radio stations are readily available, whether you speak the language or not. The ability to transition between different types of music remains one of the biggest draws of freestanding internet radio. So why do I prefer this particular device?

If you are a sound system junkie, then you probably already have a set of speakers that will produce the sound you need without extra help. I appreciate the backstory of UE and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of sound that came out through such a small speaker. I love my music, but I'm not speaker savvy and so the mediocre speakers I hooked my Touch up to would have made some of you blush. The guesswork is taken out of my musical leanings now, as I have built in speakers that provide a higher quality sound than I am accustomed to. In a small space, and with little need for technical expertise I am able to channel Eddie Van Halen's appreciation of "pure, unadulterated music."

In classic radio style, the six preset buttons are just too darned convenient. What at first seemed quite gimicky, has come to be an integral part of my day. For much of the past two months I have bought the device back and forth to work. It is a wonderful thing on Monday morning to sit down in my office in Southern Maine and at the touch of a single button be listening to Steve Wright in the afternoon all the way from England.

The ultimate winner for me was its portability. Where with the Squeezebox Touch I needed to hook the device up to speakers and to a power source, with the UE Smart Radio I need only the power source. It gives me much greater flexibility, hence the placing of it on the cake table at a three-year-old's birthday party. The six-hour battery makes it usable in situations where we previously relied on a boombox or some kind of iPod hookup. I can use it for office Christmas parties, pass it to a co-worker who needs to listen to a baseball game, ahem, important conference, and I can use it with my toddler safely as no matter how much he touches the screen, it won't change a thing!

It's not all good news however. I may have gotten used to the screen being for decoration only but I cannot get used to the volume control. What, you say? Surely that big knob in the middle of the device is easy to use! But my friends, the big dial on this machine is not the volume, the volume is controlled by a smaller knob off to the left of the imposing control. The main knob controls the movement on your screen, but no matter how much time passes, my brain still tells me that if it's large and central it must be the volume control. This is a roll over from the Logitech Squeezebox Radio Music Player and makes for some clunky usage, but amazingly is still not enough to keep me from preferring this device.

There has been a lot of discussion concerning the UE series from Logitech, and many who experienced the Squeezebox line are finding that they have lost functionality. While this has not been my experience, it's worth bearing in mind and checking out the online discussions if you are considering making a switch. After converting from my Squeezebox Touch I do find that I miss the ability to change the appearance of the screen. You can set different background images for the UE Smart Radio, but you no longer have the choice of gauges or equalizer on your main screen. Again, this is not a deal breaker.

Also not a deal breaker? The fact that setting up "My Music" to reach out and extract from my iTunes account was a month-long process and is still not complete. The device is so new that the forums haven't yet cracked some of the obscure issues, such as this, that you might have, and the online help only gets you so far before saying your machine must be working now, even if it's not! I just love sites that ask if this answer was helpful and when you say no, it pops up with "Thank you." The lack of remote took much less getting used to than I thought, but come to find out there is an infra-red receptor in the UE Smart Radio that enables the use of your Logitech remote. Whether or not this will fade out on later versions remains to be seen. At the end of the day the quality of sound, ease of use, and just plain space-age-sci-fi-brilliance of the UE Smart Radio keeps outweighing any problems I have.

Set-up is simple enough, but a word of caution. When setting up your machine for the first time, don't get impatient with it, sit back and let it do its thing. If you are impatient like I was you might find yourself accidentally programming the device to German instead of English and then spending a good chunk of an evening trying to remember 8th grade German classes. My husband tells me that most people don't have even my limited knowledge of the German language, and while I was able to reset the machine to English I would advise you to just be patient. Unless you want to read all the text in German of course, then by all means have at it.

I was provided with a UE Smart Radio to review.