Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Subtitle: A Very Expensive 7" Digital Picture Frame
This little stereo looks great. It has a sleek, glossy, modern black case that fits in well in a modern decor. The digital picture function is excellent. You transfer your photos via a USB drive, then they play on the screen in clear color with some pretty transitions. You can also transfer your MP3 audio and MP4 video to the device (or just play them directly from your USB drive). The video quality is very good, and the audio quality is acceptable, if only just. You can't expect much from such small speakers, so the sound is a bit tinny. The remote is small and easy to use. Also, you can plug in anything that has a 3.5" headset jack to play the audio through this unit.
Unfortunately, that's where the good stuff ends. I had hoped to use this primarily as an Internet radio, but it does not function as advertised there. I have a WiFi b/g/n network running WPA2 Personal security. I have many items connected to this network, including four PCs, two DVRs, a BluRay player, a bridge, a printer, a couple of Palm Pres, and all of these connected to the network first time, just as they were supposed to. The Aura Sound Station will not connect to the network at all. Every time I try, I get "CONNECTED: FAIL." I emailed tech support, but have never heard back from them. Therefore, this "Internet radio" is no such thing since it will not connect to the Internet. Of course, I should have taken it as a bad sign when the connection menu asked me for my "passward." Misspellings in the user interface are never an indication of good quality control.
So, if I cannot listen to Internet radio, at least it has FM radio, right? Well, not exactly. I plugged in the FM antenna and got no stations at all. I held the antenna every way possible, and I still couldn't get a station that transmits 2.5 miles from my home! There is a menu setting for US or European FM, but it was on the default US setting.
So, no Internet radio, and no FM radio, but at least it has an alarm clock, right? OK, technically it has an alarm clock, but it doesn't have a working clock, so the alarm clock is useless. Yep, I set the clock as soon as I started it up, and the clock stopped at 8:03 PM. No matter what I set it to, it always displays 8:03 PM. Useful in finding the time of death in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, but not so useful for telling time. I have never seen a digital clock stop before, so that was interesting, at least!
So, no Internet radio, no FM radio, and no alarm clock, what's left? Well, that leaves you with an expensive MP3 player/digital picture frame. The touchscreen isn't as responsive as many, so even as an MP3 player, this leaves a lot to be desired. You can scroll through your songs, but every second or third page you will accidentally select a song while trying to scroll. Hopefully, you only like songs that start with A or B! Likewise, all music is dumped into the root folder, so you can't even just find a folder of songs you want to hear and play that, you are stuck with the entire list every time!
The only thing I didn't get to review here is the iPhone dock, since I do not own an iAnything. Maybe that works REALLLY well to make up for all the other deficiencies. At least it has a nice door covering the iPhone dock, so you don't have an ugly hole in the top when there isn't an iPhone there.
Maybe they'll fix these problems in a firmware update, but considering that tech support ignores emails, I'm not holding my breath. If these are fixed with a firmware upgrade, I'll return here to ammend my review. In the meantime, give this one a pass!
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