Revo Pico Radiostation review

Revo’s Pico Radiostation is a smart-looking portable audio streamer, internet radio and RSS podcast receiver with a built-in DAB and FM radio.

Its built-in mono speaker was loud enough to hear throughout our labs – equivalent to a large lounge – and didn’t distort even at full volume. It’s small enough to easily fit on a kitchen worktop, and is splash-proof, too. It also has a built-in rechargeable Li-ion battery that lasts around 12 hours, so you could listen in the bath or while watering the garden.

Most of the Radiostation’s functions can be accessed using the dial and buttons on its front panel, although a pause button is a somewhat annoying omission. The two-line LCD screen is rather small, but using the dial to scroll through files and radio stations was a pleasure. The same can’t be said for the remote control, which is small, cheap-feeling, uncomfortable to use and easy to lose. The Radiostation has both wired and wireless networking. Although it was tedious, we didn’t have much trouble using the dial to enter our WPA key.

As well as a built in speaker, the Radiostation has a pair of phono outputs and a mini-jack headphone socket. A mini-jack input at the front allows you to use it as a speaker for another device, such as an MP3 player.

Like most streaming audio receivers, the Radiostation supports both UPnP and SMB shared folders and is compatible with MP3 and WMA audio formats, along with RealMedia streams and various uncompressed formats such as Wav and AIFF. This should suit most people, although we’d have liked to see support for Ogg audio streams, which are becoming more popular. To add new internet radio streams and podcasts subscriptions, you must register online at www.wifiradio-fontier.com.

The Radiostation did everything we asked of it, and did it well. The small LCD screen and cheap remote control are more than made up for by its ease of use, audio quality and portability. If you don’t want to be tied to one spot, this is the receiver for you.