View Quest Portable Internet Radio

This little Internet radio, sold here under the View Quest brand, is a very mixed bag indeed. A bit of Google research shows it to be a product of the Hong Kong based Brilliant Peak Company, and manufactured at their factory in Guangdong. The clever bits are designed by UK company CSR Plc - Cambridge Silicon Radio - and through them connectivity to the vTuner Internet portal. The radio is sold under a number of brand names around the world, some brands provide an additional FM band, and some come with international power adaptors.

This View Quest branded model is just the basic Internet radio only and is supplied by Hampshire based Pyramid Ltd, but is customised for the UK market. The menu brings up the UK as the default location and it has a pre-programmed list of BBC stations. I had no trouble connecting to my BT Home Hub 1.5 - it just needed the 10 digit WEP code to be entered - however I had to use a magnifying glass as the display digits are so small!

Once connected the range from the router is very good - I got a good signal all over the house and even a useable signal at the far end of my garden. The sound quality from the small mono speaker is not too bad, but stereo through headphones is really good. Quite a bit of thought has gone into the design of this radio and it actually won the German IF design award earlier this year.

What lets this radio down is the unreliable or non-connectivity to stations in the vTuner database. I have used vTuner on another WiFi radio and it works much better than it does on this View Quest. Another reviewer mentions no RTE stations and that is still the case, some BBC stations stream unreliably or not at all, and my local Kent stations from KMFM do not work at all. All these stations work fine on my other vTuner radio and also on Reciva based radios so the streaming is OK although this radio says not.

This rather spoils what is otherwise a very innovative radio - it all depends on which stations you want to listen to! Many stations work really well, fortunately including most of the ones I want to listen to. I would love to be able to recommend this radio as I am really quite pleased with it, but just in case your favourite station doesn't work it with it I won't; four stars for what it does well for me.

I have been willing myself to like this radio. It's size is amazing - much smaller than I thought from the photos; and the sound quality (especially spoken word) is excellent. It has a smart minimalist, almost Apple like feel about it. But, over the few days I have been trying it out, it just does not live up to expectations in performance. I am not new to internet radio - I have a quite old Logik mains wi-fi radio from Dixons, which was only £35 when on sale, but needed a home made hardware upgrade in the shape of a new wi-fi adapter to improve range and stability (plus re-fitting the speaker through 180 degrees to rid it of mains hum (so a pretty lousy piece of hardware until my DIY!)).

I got the View Quest to connect to my home wi-fi without problem; it remembers the connection key fine and the range is adequate throughout most of my house and into the garden. The radio is charged via mini USB; a cable is supplied, but not a mains charger, so unless you have a USB mains charger, you will need to charge via via your PC. All this is fine.

The problem is with performance and stability. Keep in mind that all internet radios are linked to an online internet radio service provider. For the View Quest it is VTuner; for my Logik it is Reciva (for Pure radios it is its own front end service called Lounge, but which probably uses VTuner or Reciva as the back end). The first thing I noticed with View Quest was that BBC podcasts (called "Shows" on the View Quest menu) would often stop and then restart (but always annoyingly from the beginning). On my Logik these listen again podcasts (called "On Demand in the Logik menu) seldom stopped, and if they did continued where the programme left off.

I then noticed two other weaknesses:

1. For locations I sampled, the View Quest has far fewer radio stations listed for e.g. under a particular country.

2. Even when listed I often got an error message saying that the programme was not streaming. The Logik managed to show them and play them just fine. For example, under Singapore (where I often travel on business) most of the 15 stations listed on View Quest would not play. All 17 listed on Logik played fine.

3. Under e.g. BBC Radio 7 Listen Again, the Logik shows dozens and dozens of podcasts available; the View Quest gave me only 5 or 6 and all children's programmes

The form factor is superb, but the actual core performance is very disappointing. I so like internet radio, that I wanted a smaller radio that I could take from room to room and into the garden - the Logik is a brick tethered to a mains lead. I even thought the View Quest is so small and light I would pop it in my suitcase for travels. But it is let down by performance. I don't know if this is the internal software (which is the latest 5.1 firmware) or bad integration with VTuner. Overall it is a waste of money and I will be sending it back to Amazon as a poor quality product. I may try the highly acclaimed Pure Evoke Flow, but is nowhere near the size and portability of the View Quest.

[Additional note: for those who want to travel with their internet radios, keep in mind very few wi-fi spots are easy to use for radio connection. Many these days have landing pages, (a browser page requiring you to agree T&C etc before connection) which are incompatible with devices without browsers such as radios]

I was so excited when I got this two weeks ago. I had no difficulties setting it up. However - as has been pointed out - RTE live streaming doesn't work although you can get podcasts. And some of the BBC networks are erratic. But when it works it is great. However two weeks of using it every day and suddenly it wouldn't charge up anymore. Dead as a dodo. I tried a different USB connector to see if it would make a difference but nothing. S0 - as brilliant as the size, portability and design are - this really isn't up to hard listening. I'm returning it with regret as I so wanted it to work.