Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

Video review of Pure Evoke Flow Wi-Fi radio

The Telegraph has done a short video review of Pure Digital's new Evoke Flow Wi-Fi radio. The reviewers at the Telegraph seem to like it, and I concur, because I've reviewed most of the widely available Wi-Fi Internet radios, and in my opinion it's the best Wi-Fi radio available at the moment in terms of sound quality. 

The BBC is going to use WMA for the higher quality live and on-demand streams receivable on Wi-Fi radios -- because Internet radios don't support Flash. And like all Internet radios, the Evoke Flow supports WMA and MP3, so it's already equipped to receive the BBC's new higher quality streams, and Pure has told me that it will support the 128 kbps Internet streams used by an increasing number of UK commercial radio stations by early next year (the streams are currently played back at a lower bit rate). The reason why the Evoke Flow can't play these higher bit rate WMA commercial radio streams yet is that they're using Microsoft's Intelligent Streaming technology, which Pure hasn't implemented yet, because the Evoke Flow has only been out for a couple of months. But Pure will provide a firmware update for the radio early next year which will provide support for Microsoft's Intelligent Streaming. The Pure Evoke Flow has coincidentally just received a firmware upgrade in the last couple of days, and the radio pops up a message telling you that there's a firmware upgrade available, and all you have to do is press a button and the radio downloads the firmware over the Internet and installs it, so you don't have to mess around with installing the firmware yourself.

As well as live and on-demand streams, the Evoke Flow can play podcasts. It can also receive DAB and FM, and it's upgradeable to DAB+. Like all Wi-Fi radios it includes a 'media player', which allows you to listen to music on the radio that's streamed wirelessly from a computer attached to your wireless home network.

One smart feature that's unique to the Evoke Flow amongst Internet radios is that it provides a touch-screen buttons on the user-interface, which works well.

Overall, I would thoroughly recommend the Pure Evoke Flow to anyone who's thinking of buying a good digital radio for someone this Christmas, or who just wants to treat themselves. Judging by other people's comments, Wi-Fi Internet radios seem to be pretty much universally loved by their owners, so I'm confident that if you haven't got one yet you wouldn't regret buying one -- it's just a shame that the BBC won't allow people to know about them, and instead they're intent on advertising to-be-obsolete DAB radios instead.

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