iPod Radio Remote: wired remote plus FM receiver
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Mar 15, 2006 at 4:55am
Many MP3 players have built-in FM tuners, but not the iPod. That’s one thing it’s been criticized for, but Apple apparently has no plans to build in such a feature. The company’s US$49 iPod Radio Remote is designed to address the situation by combining the convenience of a wired remote control with new FM radio capabilities for the iPod nano and 5G (video) iPod.
Overall, the iPod Radio Remote is pretty convenient. You can use it to skip tracks and adjust the volume of your iPod even when it’s in a pocket or backpack, and listen to FM radio stations while displaying station and song information on their iPod screen in a display that looks like a “real” radio.
The device looks like a sawed-off iPod shuffle. In fact, if you didn’t know what it was, its appearance would never give it away as a FM receiver. That’s only evident when you connect it to your iPod. Once they’re united (via the Dock connector), a Radio menu item shows up in the Music menu. Click it and and you’ll see a digital FM tuner with both the station frequency and its position on the radio spectrum. You tune stations by turning the Click Wheel. The iPod displays station and song information for stations that support the Radio Data System (RDS). It’s a nice feature that works fine with my 5G iPod, though I have heard reports that this feature is a little more unstable with nanos.
You can create presets by pressing the central button while the station is playing. To jump through your preset station list you push the forward/backward buttons on either the iPod or the remote. The Click Wheel isn’t the most precise station tuner I’ve ever used; you’ll probably overshoot a few stations as you get the hang of it.
The iPod Radio Remote includes a pair of Apple headphones with a shorter cable. The cable also doubles as an antenna (very clever, no?), so you don’t need to just coil ‘em up. Thankfully, the remote is on a clip, so you can at least attach it to pocket, belt or collar.
On the down side, you can’t switch from radio to playlists on the remote itself. And the radio reception is, due to the nature of the beast, pretty spotty. Big stations come in strong, smaller ones fade in and out.
The iPod Radio Remote isn’t as elegant a solution as built-in FM reception would be, but it’s a reasonable alternative.
Macsimum rating: 7 out of 10.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
