Gadget: Pure Siesta Flow

FM radio reception has always been a bit hit and miss in my area, which is why I have a couple of DAB radios around the house. However, my bedroom clock radio is still an old FM model (10 years!), and lately, I’ve found things worse than ever – decent reception when it wakes me up, but the moment I start walking around the bedroom, the signal comes and goes.

So I have just bought a replacement – the Pure Siesta Flow. This has a total of 4 alarm registers, which can be set to different day ranges – hence you can have a totally different wakeup routine at the weekend, without having to change anything. When the alarm goes, you have a choice of sources:

Conventional beep
FM Radio
DAB Digital Radio
MP3 via WiFi, from any compatible media server (UPnP and similar)
Internet Radio Streams via WiFi
Podcasts via WiFi
Pure Sounds – a weird collection of bird noises, crashing waves and waterfalls.

It is very easy to use, and although – with all this functionality – it might be fiddly to select your favourite channels from a choice of thousands, there is the Pure Lounge – a website you can log onto and do just that, which then configures the radio for you. Within a few moments, I had it configured to always have the last two episodes of Just a Minute and The Now Show available.

The sound is very good – although it is supposedly stereo, it is a small unit with no speaker separation, but it is nice and clear, and music sounds good. There is a headphones socket, so I guess I could always connect a pair of powered speakers if I wanted proper stereo.

Finally, it has a USB port on the side – from what I can gather, this is not to connect a hard disk or memory stick (although I will try that sometime), but it is described as a way to power any gadgets on your bedside table – i.e. HTC Desire, Kindle etc. How considerate!

2 Comments

  1. April 1, 2011
    Reply

    I assume it works as a clock as well? We had to ditch the DAB clock radio we picked up a while back because the display was too dim to read.

    • chris
      April 2, 2011
      Reply

      This one has a bright display which you can optionally dim, but as I am used to sleeping with a selection of LED lights in the room, it bothers me not.

      When actively playing a station, the display (by default) switches to displaying station information, relegating the time to a small line at the top. Like you, I expect a clock to work as a clock – fortunately the display options allowed me to set it to display the time permanently.

      The reviews I have seen of this device have slammed the control buttons for tuning etc, which are touch sensitive, and they say too sensitive. I’ve had no such problems, and found it easy to set up. Regular functions like on/off, snooze and volume control are normal buttons.

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