Product Reviews

Of all the criticisms levelled at the iPod, the lack of an FM receiver is the most damning. Every other personal digital music player in the iPod's class has one, after all. The iPod Radio Remote is Apple's attempt to remedy the situation.

The combination of FM receiver and remote control is a nifty piece of marketing, as well as engineering. Had Apple offered only an FM receiver as an optional extra, it would have been criticised for asking us to pay for something that should be included as part of the core product. By including it with the remote control it quietly withdrew from the standard iPod offering last year, it can argue that you get two products for the price of one. And if that doesn't satisfy you, there's a set of the ubiquitous white earphones chucked in as well.

The Radio Remote looks like an iPod shuffle that's been trimmed around the controls and has a clip on the back. There's nothing

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on it that marks it out as an FM receiver - that part of its functionality only becomes apparent when you plug it into a supported iPod. Its controls comprise play/pause, step forward, step backward and volume, and these work with all the iPod's functions.

Before you can use the Radio Remote, you must have the latest iPod software (version 1.1) installed. If you haven't updated your iPod for a while, you'll need to do that.

With the Radio Remote plugged into your iPod's Dock connector, a Radio menu item appears in the Music menu. Clicking this displays a digital FM tuner with both the station frequency and its position on the spectrum displayed. To tune it, you push the iPod's central button and spin the Click Wheel until you reach the station you want. The station's RDS data is then displayed on screen as its content plays through your earphones. To create a preset, you press the central button while the station is playing. You can step through preset stations using the step forward/ step backward controls on the iPod or remote.

Our only real complaint with the Radio Remote is that it can be rather fiddly to tune because the Click Wheel isn't the most precise of tools. However, it's not too frustrating.

We still think that both the remote and the FM receiver should be in the iPod box as standard. That aside, the iPod Radio Remote is a neat solution for anyone who wants to listen to FM radio on their iPod, and it's smaller and a lot more portable than Griffin's iFM.