Grace Digital Wireless Internet Radio Adapter Featuring Pandora and SIRIUS (GDI-IRA500)

This radio is great! It's by no means perfect, but for the right situation I don't think there's anything better for the price. We use ours to play music over a PA system in a shop, so we had some specific needs and this radio fits perfectly.Here's a few specifics that might be of use to someone:* When it's turned on, the radio automatically starts playing the last played radio station.It may seem obvious, but it was a concern and wouldn't have worked for our situation had that not been the case. When we get to the shop in the morning, we turn the radio on and it automatically starts streaming the last station we were playing--even Pandora radio. The radio takes less than 10 seconds to connect to the streaming station, buffer, and begin playing, but this time may vary depending on network conditions.* It remembers things when it's unplugged.There is a very handy History list in the My Stuff menu. We live and die by this list because we haven't bothered to go to the website to add stations to our favorites-- it remembers at least the last 10 stations. Only downside is it doesn't specify if the station is an internet radio station or an app station (like Pandora), and sometimes the names kind of blur together when you listen to the same kind of music across different stations. If the radio loses power, it doesn't lose this list or the last played station, or the WIFI settings, or the clock. It remembers all of it.* If it loses power while playing, it will not resume playing when power is restored.This is actually great for us, but I could see it varying person to person. When power is restored, it "boots up" and connects to wifi, but then stays in the `off' state until it's turned on. When turned on, it will automatically play the last played station. Again, for us this was great, but I could see it being a negative or others. From an unpowered state, the radio takes 35 - 45 seconds to fully boot and be ready to turn on (this includes connecting to wifi, so this time may vary depending on networking conditions).* The cord on the AC/DC adapter is about 6ft long.We were worried that the cord would be too short to mount the radio in our equipment room the way we needed to--but for us 6ft was enough. The adapter also has a green LED light on the base to show when the adapter has power. It's bright but not oppressively so.* The radio doesn't easily mount to the wall.This is a strange bulletpoint I'm sure, but for us it was an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise very capable product. Due to the way the cables plug into the back of the radio, it can't lay flat on its back on a wall. We built a small shelf and then ziptied the radio to the shelf from the black bar that goes across the back of the radio at the bottom. Not a perfect solution, but it works.* The iOS remote control app is great, but not perfect.I can't speak to the quality of the android app, but the iOS app works reasonably well. In fact, the app has all the features you could possibly want. It has a mirror copy of the menu from the radio, so anything you can do from the radio you can do from the app. It has a Now playing section that gives you access to volume controls, and it even has a mute button (the radio itself doesn't have one). If you are playing Pandora radio, it will display Album Covers. However, the app is quite buggy. It crashes very often for me, especially if you are switching tabs a lot at the bottom of the app. But if used primarily as a remote to change stations, it works well. The crashes VERY occasionally crash the whole radio, forcing it to reboot, but I can count these occurrences on one hand. The app can also control multiple radios, although I've never used this feature personally.* The app is free and has no login.Another feature that is good or bad depending on your situation--the app is free to download. Once installed, all it needs is for the smart phone to be on the same wifi network as the radio and the app will automatically find the radio and allow you to control it. There is no way (that I know of) to keep someone from controlling the radio if they can get on your wifi. This hasn't been a problem for us so far, but we worry about the day that another employee realizes how easy it is to do.

I came looking for internet radios after a hideous moment in customer service when SiriusXM satellite radio (in the US and Canada) just dropped BBC Radio 1 without warning. Constant lobbying by pressure groups and social networking failed to change their mind so I cancelled my subscriptions and went looking for alternatives. The Solo is working for us now as just such an alternative.We hooked it up to our regular radio and listened to Radio 1 live (although they're 7 hours ahead of us). Then we tried the BBC's on-demand programs. Good news - the back-end for this radio (reciva.com) was able to find and use the BBC on-demand stuff! Bad news - we kept getting "stream ended" messages which meant starting the program again.Hooking it to our wireless network wasn't too involved. I don't broadcast my SSID so I had to tell the radio the network name, then give it the WPA2 key and it jumped right on. First thing it did was ask to update the firmware, so I let it, then I started with the remote. What a giant pain in the ass this thing is - it's a tiny little credit-card sized remote with awful little clicky buttons. The on-unit controls aren't exactly brilliant either but what saved it from a two star review is that Grace have a free iPod/iPhone/iPad app. Assuming your iDevice is on the same wifi as the Grace radio, the app gives you a beautiful full-screen touch-control interface which is a total breeze to use. Everything from finding on-demand streams, to live radio from anywhere in the world is really easy to find. You can set up playlists and presets too which is great. The Grace was also able to see all the files on my Windows Server so we're able to stream all our audio from there too, and once I hooked it up to Pandora, it showed up those stations quite easily as well.The iDevice app does need some polish though - getting to some of the streams is less than intuitive but once you learn the right menu sequence it's not too hard.So that's why I gave this 3 stars instead of 4. The app is the saving Grace (pun entirely intended) of this radio. Listening live doesn't seem to be a problem but if you're looking for on-demand radio, might be best to look elsewhere. It's a shame - I love to favour the underdog but in this case, Grace have lost out and ultimately been replaced with a Logitech Squeezebox radio.