The radio is quite a departure for the normally staid Roberts designs, this is available in a range of 5 colours and is styled a bit like a chunky cheese and looks highly functional almost industrial without being boring. The front of the Solar DAB is dominated by a large speaker grill and a cluster of Knobs and buttons by the LCD screen on the left hand side of the face. The buttons are fairly standard control tuning , volume and presets, the LCD screen shows station info, any text being broadcast and the battery status. However there is one crucial addition to the display and that's the charge bar, this shows the amount of charge that the Roberts Solar is getting from the panel on the top edge of the radio.

At one end of the scale as a cloudy symbol showing the lowest rate of charge and at the top end a sun symbol, the further u the scale you go the faster the battery is charging. Now the battery will run the radio for some 27 hours on a full charge and you can charge the battery via normal means but we wanted to see just how long it would take to charge the eco radio from flat. So we started our test by playing the radio on various stations to see what we thought of it as an out and out DAB unit and at the same time kill the battery!

The speaker goes good and loud for a fairly small box and the sound is rich and warm in the Roberts style, perhaps a little too rich for our tastes but each to their own. We'd say that Roberts are best suited to speech and classical music and this radio doesn't buck the trend it sounded a little muddy on radio 1 and virgin almost sluggish. But compared to an FM radio or even some of the cheaper DAB radios this is much better.

So now we have a flat battery and an average summers day in the UK, i.e. dull and overcast, the Roberts solar was placed on a window ledge with good sky views and left to do its stuff, the bar showed right down at the lower end of the charge scale so this could take a while. Later in the day we took a peek to see that there was now one bar of charge on the radio and that now the gloom had lifted a bit the charge speed was increasing a little.

So we headed off for the day praying for sun tomorrow as clearly one cloudy day wasn't going to charge this DAB radio. The new day brought good news, sunshine! we checked the radio which now had an extra bar on the battery meter from the early rays and the charge indicator was in the upper third. Sure enough come 4pm and all the bars were lit on the battery, so judging from that perhaps a full days charge in direct sunlight would be enough?

All in all the solar charger does seem to function and although not rapid it is certainly a great idea especially if you are at the beach all day or away camping or fishing. Priced at £79.99 the Roberts Solar DAB lives up to its billing as a green gheto blaster if perhaps a little too refined.

Published - 11/08/2008

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