Revo Ikon iPod dock and digital radio

The Revo Ikon is an iPod docking station with a built-in digital radio tuner, as well as built-in networking connections that allow you to receive Internet radio and stream music from your computers. It has two 15W speakers and a 3.5in touch screen interface, but it is a small and hard-to-use interface, and the dock overall could use a better physical design.

The Revo Ikon looks sleek at first glance; it's a reasonably small and lightweight iPod dock that doesn't take up much room at all. It would sit comfortably in a bedroom — particularly on an end table — allowing you to make full use of its alarm clock radio function. However, several parts, including the volume wheel and roof mounted antenna don't quite fit in with the overall design. The antenna for analogue radio is mounted at the top of the dock and it restricts users from locating the device in a shelf or wall unit.

The dock's face incorporates a minimalist approach with the absence of buttons and has a generally seamless design. We were disappointed to see that the device sports a matte finish as opposed to a glossy one, which we think would work well around the 3.5in touchscreen.

The speakers afforded us an enjoyable listening experience in our tests. The two 15W speakers performed well during our audio tests, delivering a high level of clarity and very little distortion when we upped the decibels. There was a greater focus on treble than bass though — even after fiddling with the dock's equaliser, we still feel as though we were short-changed when it came to bass.

Using the iPod dock as digital radio, we were thoroughly pleased with its quality and reception. However, the reception will depend on your location. When listening to digital radio, the name and genre of songs will be displayed on the 3.5in screen.

We found the overall build quality of the device to be below average considering its steep asking price of $599.00. The tray that pops out to expose the iPod dock feels flimsy and sometimes it doesn't even pop out at all. Furthermore, when we took a look underneath the speaker cloth, we found remnants of some sort of glue resin visible on the speaker.

Navigating the Ikon's interface can be tough as it's slow, unintuitive and difficult unless you have pencils for fingers. When you use an iPod, you can only select music by navigating on the iPod — the touchscreen only lets you play, stop and skip files. Streaming music from the Internet is easy enough; either plug in an Ethernet cable or connect to your local network via WiFi. The Ikon was able to connect to our 802.11n Linksys router and we were able to enter our WPA-AES passkey manually.

However, streaming music from a PC wasn't so smooth. It would play one or two songs before saying it was reconnecting. The interface for playing music off a PC is also hard to use — it's much easier if you create playlists on the PC and use those.

Depending on the Apple device you'll be plugging in to the dock, you have to find the right adapter cartridge for it. We found it frustrating trying to find the right cartridge for our iPod Classic, because the cartridges came unlabelled. It was basically a game of trial and error. Unfortunately we could not find the right cartridge for our iPod Classic and therefore had to put up with the device sitting loose in the dock and hitting into the Ikon's face every time we pressed the buttons on the iPod to look for an album or a song.

The remote control that ships with the Ikon proved to be handy for skipping tracks, changing the volume, but it doesn't allow you to do anything else. We wish it allowed you to change modes and it could also use some arrow buttons for navigating the screen when you set it up.