The Coby IR850 is an Internet + FM clock radio designed with ease of use in mind. While many Internet radios rely on the Reciva service to locate and connect with Internet radio stations, the Coby IR850 uses the competing vTuner service.
We received our Coby IR850 review unit earlier today and spent several hours marveling at the logical design, good quality sound, and simple menu layout. The first order of business, of course, is to configure the details of your wireless Internet connection. The Coby offered a list of SSIDs it saw in the local aether including the one we wanted to use, an 802.11n Linksys router configured for WPA2 security. On our second try we managed to enter the correct passphrase using the typical motion arrows and select button often found in Internet radios. Once we managed to enter the actual passphrase without any typos the radio connected to our Wi Fi LAN right away, and has not hiccuped since.
The information available while listening to a station is fairly rich. Each press of the Info button on top of the radio or on the remote control toggles through a different set of data about the current station. I like the technical display of bit rate, codec used, and audio sampling rate.
You can add podcasts or stations to the list of favorites configured online. Your settings are saved during a power failure. The radio sets the time automatically using an NTP server, and lets you select 12 or 24 hour format. We even discovered, by yanking the power cord intentionally, that if the radio loses power while you are listening to a radio station it will resume playing that station automagically once power is restored, that's really deluxe!
The sound quality is quite good with surprisingly strong bass for a table top radio, the radio features software driven bass and teble controls that we used to crank up the highs a few db.
Even the FM radio is better than our existing Sony clock radio, pulling in a weak PBS station nearly 50 miles away while sat 2 feet from my RF noisy computer.
All in all this radio far exceeds our expectations, and so does the online favorites configuration. We give the Coby IR850 an unqualified 5 star rating.
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Coby IR850 Wireless Internet Radio System (Black) List Price: $179.99 Sale Price: $61.95 Average Rating:   |
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Traditional radio gets a digital upgrade with Coby's IR850 wireless internet radio system. Featuring both wireless internet and FM receiver, this system receives broadcasts from both traditional and web radio, giving you flawless reception, premium sound, and thousands of stations to choose from... |
We expect others will be pleased with this radio too.