First Take: Roku's SoundBridge Internet Radio

I wanted to love Roku's SoundBridge Radio. Listening to a clock radio has been a morning ritual for me forever. And I love digital music. Shipping soon, the $400 SoundBridge is a Wi-Fi-enabled tabletop clock radio that does digital music (and news, and talk, and sports) in a bunch of formats, snagging content from your own digital audio collection, subscription services, and streaming radio stations. It's impressive in a number of ways--but not quite the device I expected.

The nicest thing about the SoundBridge Radio is that it's...well, a nice radio first: a compact, good-looking unit that'll fit comfortably on a dresser, with excellent audio quality. (The sound compares favorably with that from my beloved Boston Receptor AM/FM radio, but unlike the Boston, the Roku has stereo speakers and a built-in subwoofer.) Like other SoundBridges, the radio has an unusually attractive fluorescent display, with helpful built-in instructions that prompt you through common tasks, and a sensor that auto-dims the display when you turn off the lights for the night.

In short, if it were just a clock radio, it would be an impressive (albeit expensive) one. With its built-in Wi-Fi, however, the SoundBridge is a network device that can talk to local and remote music sources wirelessly. That's where its greatest potential lies--as well as my one big frustration with it.

The big attraction of Internet radio is its sheer quantity and variety, a theme that Roku plays up with the tagline "10,000 Stations. No Strings Attached." But here's where the SoundBridge disappointed me: It doesn't let you easily explore all that stuff. About 70 streams are preprogrammed into the radio, but there's no way to navigate directly to the thousands of stations that aren't preprogrammed directly from the SoundBridge. You've got to find WMA and MP3-format stations you like by tracking them down in a Web browser on a computer, figure out the URLs that point to their streams, then paste the links into the SoundBridge's 18 presets via a browser-based interface.

If that sounds clunky, it is: It feels more like "18 Stations. No Strings Attached," or possibly "10,000 Stations. Some Strings Attached." What I'd like to do is browse thousands of stations (or hundreds, at least) right from the SoundBridge. Roku says it's possible that it will add that sort of functionality in an update. (The SoundBridge's software is upgradable, via a slick interface that detects updates automatically, and installs them once you give permission.)

Internet radio, fortunately, is not the SoundBridge's only source of entertainment. It does AM, FM, music stored on PCs and Macs in various formats, and downloads and streams from services (such as Rhapsody and Napster) that use Microsoft's Windows Media (PlaysForSure) DRM. I used it to tune into music and podcasts stored on an Apple PowerBook on my network, and it worked wonderfully well, letting me browse playlists, artists, albums, and genres--if an iPod were a clock radio, it would feel like this. (Like almost every other non-Apple music device, the SoundBridge can't play copy-protected songs from the iTunes Music Store; blame Apple and its unwillingess to licese its Fairplay DRM for this omission.)

The SoundBridge has an SD slot that lets you play unprotected audio directly from a card. You probably won't have much need for this capability as long as the radio's on a network and can talk to a PC-based music library, but it might come in handy if you ever have reason to use it in a disconnected environment.

As for other downsides, I encountered two, neither of which is a showstopper. I had to reconfigure my Wi-Fi network to get it up and running--it supports only the older, clunkier WEP wireless security standard, not the newer WPA. (WPA will be added in a software update, says Roku.) And although the radio's user interface is in many ways elegant and intuitive, the relationship between the buttons on the radio itself and the remote control is a little odd: There are some things you can do only via the radio and others that require the remote, and tasks that can be performed on both are sometimes accomplished in different ways.

The SoundBridge isn't perfect, but for the moment, at least, it's unique. At $400, it's priced to compete with more traditional upper-crust audio gizmos such as Bose's Wave Radio II, which is $50 less but does only plain ol' AM and FM. If Roku's radio packed truly easy access to thousands of Internet streams, I'd be tempted; without such capability, it feels incomplete, especially given its pricetag.

Of course, Roku may knock down the SoundBridge's price eventually, or beef up its Internet tuning capabilities; either move would boost this innovative product's appeal. And if the company did both, this could become the killer gadget I'd hoped for.