Philips MC-i250 Review

I want to let you all know that I have purchased the Philips MC-i250 and just finished hooking it up to my DSL line. The radio is great. For the price I think its what we have all been waiting for. Finally a radio! -just a radio. No need to keep your computer logged on to a site on the internet to listen to an internet radio station. For more info please contact Jakob Nielsen. Email: Jakob@Suite108.com.

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The radio was shipped in a box clearly labelled with Philips logos. I ordered the radio from Amazon.com...and the radio arrived in just a few days. The unpacking was quite easy and I decided to hook the radio up without reading the manual first. Just to see how far I could get without any help.

After hooking up power cable, Speakers and the supplied CAT-5 cable. I turned the radio on and it first installed the FM Radio. Funny as it is being that it is a radio and not a computer the first words on the LCD screen was: "Installing FM Tuner".

So moving on it asked me to setup my network. So I found an open IP from my DSL router, entered the subnet mask and the gateway IP and ofcourse the DNS server IPs. Now here it is getting a bit into the world of computers, but then again it is an internet radio receiver right :) -After the slightly unfamiliar way of entering IP numbers using the Dial on the front of the radio it continued on asking me for my e-mail address. So I entered my e-mail and it told me to click on a link sent to me from my.philips.com. So I went to my computer opened up the newly arrived e-mail and followed the instructions. It was quite simple not much to it. my.philips.com is very easy to navigate and is necessary as the first step to get you radio to work and it only to a few minutes.

In the My Streams category I entered the link to Radio Gets wild Shoutcast stream. I did this because I could not find RGW in the already available Live365 directory available on the dial on the radio itself. Im not sure why RGW does not come up on in the live365 listings.

So I went back to the radio, hit the Favority button on the front of the radio and found Radio Gets Wild as I had just setup at my.philips.com. I clicked the playbutton and the radio tuned in Radio Gets Wild in less than 2 seconds.

Overall the radio sounds great, works great and was average to setup. Almost forgot to mention the Voice Guiding system. Guiding me through the initial setup of the radio. Pretty cool feature and very personal. Also it has wireless 802.11b connectivity. I dont have a wireless network at home but I am considering buying a wireless hub to test out the radio. The radio has more features like PC-Link which allows the radio to play music stored on your home PC with the help of Musicmatch Jukebox. It also has a CD-Drive and can play Music CD's and MP3 CD's. Oh yeah and ofcourse it is backwards compatible...hehe...had to get that new term in there. What I meant to say was it has an AM and an FM Reciever as well.

Philips has done a great job with this radio. I'm hoping to see more internet radio devices on the shelves at next years christmas.