Blik Wi-Fi Radio Alarm Clock Review
Published by Budda January 6th, 2008 in Gadgets, Wi-Fi, Audio, iPod, Reviews.
In our quest to find a decent working Wi-Fi radio the Revo Blik has been getting a months worth of testing.
The Blik brick looking Wi-Fi radio is based on the same name DAB device also from Revo. They look identical - except you get Wi-Fi in this one for £50 less on the RRP.
The case style might not be for everyone, it looks a little space age, or 80’s - you decide. But it’s a nice change from the retro looking wooden cased radios that seemed to be the case for every DAB unit in the past few years. You get a choice of black of white plastic casing - with a black LCD display and blue backlight for the icon and text. The display is dot matrix rather than nasty old digital, although the scrolling of text isn’t incredibly smooth on the display.
The top of the case includes a large selection of buttons. All being the same smallish size makes it hard to find the right button easily whilst fumbling around in the morning. I found the button positioning and small text on them to be a slightly annoying design issue. Luckily the thoughtful guys at Revo included a slim remote control which you can pick up and point from the bed - or program your own multi remote as a substitute!
As an added bonus to the Blik Wi-Fi you get a nice back up of an FM receiver - for those days when your internet is down. However this will not automatically kick in, should your alarm come on pre-tuned to an internet station.
The Blik is sold as a bed side alarm clock, and comes with two alarm memories, perfect for week days and the lie in on the weekend. Alarms can operate either the Wi-Fi or FM stations.
When not waking up, you can also use the unit to listen to music before sleep, setting the volume low gives a clear sound (unlike my previous review of the Intempo GX 01)
Sound wise the built in speaker can give a fair punch when the volume is cracked out - I can hear it clearly from other rooms with little distortion. The unit also comes with stereo RCA output connections to hook up some powered speakers, or an AMP. Other connections include a 3.5mm headphone jack and Revo’s “m-port” for ipod, or other mp3 player, connectivity. The cable is provided with the Blik.
Like most Internet radio devices, the Blik features Reciva’s Barracuda Internet Radio Technology. Connecting to the home Wi-Fi network was a fairly simple job, and entering a security password/key was a fairly painless job using the arrows to scroll through the alphabet characters. The initial connection period does seem rather long, even on an unsecured network. It seems to spend ages doing nothing before springing in to life. The Intempo GX-01 we reviewed last year didn’t have this problem so I am assuming it is a firmware issue of the Blik device.
When the device is in standby mode you get a useful clock display on the LCD, however as with other Wi-Fi clock radios i’ve tested, as soon as the device is turned on the clock is no longer available - a stupid error for a clock radio in my opinion!
Whilst mentioning problems of the Blik it’s also worth noting that in the two units tested, both suffered from network connection loss after about 20-30 minutes of streaming. The connection does come back within a minute, but is a minor annoyance that really should not be happening.
Internet radio wise, you get the 8000+ stations, sorted by country or genre. The method of accessing the stations works, although the delay in refreshing the station list all the time can start to grind. It’s also a pain to sample stations because every time you select one it means going back to the station list and scrolling through all the previous ones to find your position again. Luckily, once you find something good - the Blik has an eight station memory which can be accessed from the remote, or directly using the buttons on the top of the unit. Another feature of Internet Radio is some stations “Listen Again” support, mainly offered by the BBC stations in the UK. The Blik handled the access of these stations fine which was a nice bonus.
Overall the Blik is a great bit of kit at an attractive £99 price point. Minor problems aside it functions reliably and should hopefully keep me waking up for a few years.
We bought the Revo Blik from AdvancedMP3Players.co.uk for £99.95. (We then used a 5% discount voucher available from BargainSpy).
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Is there a buzzer or bleeper option for the alarm?
How does the snooze work, is there a big snooze button?
It would be great if snooze put on the radio but set off the buzzer again in 10 minutes.
There is an annoying buzzer alarm available.
the snooze button is the same tiny size as all other buttons. if you hit any button other than the snooze one it just turns the radio off. so you have to be very accurate, or just get out of bed!
if the radio is already on, and you have an alarm set it is intelligent enough to work out that putting the radio on as an alarm will not be heard, so switches over to put the buzzer on instead of the radio.