[ Background music ] >> Hi I'm Mathew Moskovciak, Senior Associate Editor at CNET.com and this is the Logitech Squeeze Box radio. It's a step down from the other tabletop radio that Logitech has, the Squeeze Box Boom, and it has a lot more to offer than your standard Wi-Fi radio. The first thing we noticed is the outstanding design of the Squeeze Box radio. If you look on the front there's a big wheel for navigation and the buttons are just intelligently placed and there's also a separate volume knob. A lot of radios try to combine navigation and the volume to 1 knob which can get a little confusing. The cabinet is made of plastic and it has a glossy black finish which does attract finger prints and if you look around back we did like there's a little handle in the back which means it makes it easy to tote from say your bedroom to the kitchen. If you look on the bottom of the radio there's a compartment for a battery pack. Now Logitech isn't selling a battery pack now, it's supposed to come out later this year and an accessory pack that includes a battery pack so you could make this portable and a remote. We really think the remote should have been included at this price. Back to the front you'll see there is an LCD display on top of just colorful graphics that look nice you get things like album art and you can display a lot more information on the screen at a time. Now like every Wi-Fi radio the Squeeze Box can access 1000s of freely available internet radio stations but really that's just a small part of what this offers. It also supports online streaming music services like Pandora, Last FM, Slacker, Rhapsody, Sirius online streaming. The squeeze box also has excellent support for your own music collection that's stored on say like a PC and the Squeeze Center software that it comes with works with Macs, PCs or even Lennox machines. A new feature on the Squeeze Box radio is it also has an app gallery which means you can download different apps like there's a Flicker app or a Facebook app which on the small screen you really can't take advantage of all the features but it does add another way for Logitech to include more features in the future. A lot of people are also going to be wondering how it works as an alarm clock. The good thing is that it's really customizable you can set which days you want the alarm to go off. There's support for multiple alarms. There's a huge bank of sounds that you can have for your alarm ringer in addition to you can cue up a song or say a radio station that you want to go off in the morning. The downside is it's just a little bit more complex. It has a clear sound and you're not gonna get distortion if you turn it all the way up which is something that you find on a lot of other Wi-Fi radios. There were a few times that we had the Squeeze Box radio hang up and even a couple of times it spontaneously rebooted and it didn't happen enough that it really turned us off to the product but we're hoping for future firmware updates. That's something that Logitech really looks into. Overall with its excellent design, unparallel feature set and solid sonics this is one of the best Wi-Fi radios we've seen all year and also one of the gadget's we've had the most fun testing. [ Background music ] >> Matthew Moskovciak: I'm Matthew Moskovciak and this is the Logitech Squeeze Box radio.
