Orange Liveradio - it's rather good

I bought myself my first wifi radio this week. I decided to get the Orange Liveradio, mainly because I'd seen one at last year's Digital Radio Show, and I figured that Orange have had time to add the features that early wifi radios had missed.

I'm really pleased I did. The set up is easy, though don't reboot your router while the Liveradio's updating its software (!) A lot of setup can be done online once you've registered your Liveradio. So - what can it do?

1) It can stream any station you can get the stream URL for, and some you can't if the station has registered with Orange's content partner.

2) It can play any podcast that's still available for download (you just need the xml/rss details)

3) It can play music from any suitable computer on your network, e.g. using Windows Media Player 11. It does seem to need uPnP turned on, which can be a security problem for routers - but that's your call. I already had that turned on for the X-Box.

4) It can play audiobooks. The standard list appear to all be librivox recordings - all out of copyright, recorded by housewives in Ohio, it seems!

Anything less than perfect with it? Well, so far just two things occur to me;

First, the speakers aren't incredible - but I guess that's to avoid battery problems with bass-rich sound. Second, when you register with Orange to get all the features working you can't easily opt out of their 3rd party database marketing. You have to separately contact customer services. I've done that, and hope it works.

A neat device...