One clue is in all the press bumf, this is an eco radio?  what we hear you ask? Yes that's right an eco radio one which has a small carbon footprint and hugs trees and strokes your cat. It's certainly strange for the consumer electronics world to claim to be green its a bit like Pol Pot claiming to be the best of the dictators, but then we have to start somewhere.

At 130 x 135 x 60mm the Pure One Mini is smaller than the One but larger than an MP3 player so while its smaller its more like a clutch bag than a walkman. SO it is definitely portable but one you'll have to carry rather than pocket. SO ideal for listening to in the park or on a building site but not as n everyday travel companion. It's available in a host of colours from the pleasing to the pink and the design is like a shrunken Pure One which isn't all that bad to look at.

The front is mostly speaker as the driver unit sits behind the plastic grill effect with only the small 16 x 2 character display above it, all the buttons are moved to the top edge and the rotary control to the side. As expected with pure products the auto tune feature works well and with DAB its easy to see what stations you are scrolling through. There are 8 DAB presets you can store stations on and also 8 FM presets as the Pure One Mini has an FM tuner as well ideal for those DAB black spot areas that still exist.

Putting out just 1.6 watts RMS you could be forgiven in expecting a terrible sound and sure this isn't going to be anything like the Pure Evoke or even your car radio but its much better than a transistor radio and has a surprising amount of bass for a such a small enclosure. Pure pride themselves on getting the best audio performance from the available size and space and with the Mini they have done it again, we hate to think what a DAB radio from some other manufacturers would sound like if they were this small.

Of course battery life and DAB are two words that don't sit that well together, but this Pure Mini is part of Pure's Eco Plus range and they boast a whopping 20 hours replay from a charge making it one of the most efficient DAB radios / chipsets on the market. Our tests managed just above 18 hours of life from the charge Pak which will always vary depending on reception conditions and temperature. If you want more life you can always purchase another Charge Pak for around £20. You can't pop in standard batteries as this would be against the green ethos of the One Mini so the more expensive Charge Pak is your only option.

Other features include Pure's text scan where you can hold, rewind and scroll through the text that many stations transmit alongside the radio signal and there is a handy 3.5mm jack should you want to listen on headphones.

Quite impressively the Pure One Mini only uses about 50% of the power of older radios at just under 3 watts when in full active mode and they claim it is made as greenly as possible. Certainly th packaging is much reduced and the box is suitably unimpressive. So much so that we only filled the kettle half way to make the tea during the write up of this review.

Retailing at £40 when it goes on sale listening to DAB radio has never been greener or more portable another good product from Pure.

Published - 06/08/2008

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