Thursday, September 17, 2009

Touchscreens are in fashion - Pure Sensia

- Pure Sensia

There have been a few new touchscreen models announced over recent weeks - with the IFA event in Berlin chosen as the launch venue.
Logitech and Revo showed off their devices there. Pure launched the Siesta Flow - but strangely seemed to hold back on the new Sensia touchscreen model - now it even has its own microsite.
Pure Sensia
The device has Internet radio, DAB and FM - and is the first model to support some of the RadioDNS protocols, in particular RadioVIS. That probably explains why the first place to have the details was Absolute Radio ... who are among the first broadcasters to support this.
This means that the radio is able to collect more information about what is being broadcast by connecting back to the Internet ... in a standard way. This could include What's On, Album artwork and potentially a click-to-buy option.

Other features of note.
  • A 5.7-inch 640x480 capacitive touchscreen (that is bigger than the fore-mentioned rivals are offering)
  • DAB, DAB+ (via future upgrade), FM and Internet Radio
  • 2 15W speakers
  • Remote control
  • Headphone socket
  • Stereo Out
  • Alarm
  • UPnP connectivity for playing media from home LAN (like the Flow models)
  • iPod connection via extra dock
  • Optional battery pack
  • Various internet apps - including Facebook (not at launch), Twitter and the weather forecast
  • Available in 4 different colours
  • Priced around 250GBP and slated for delivery in mid-October
There is also some talk of a public API coming so that 3rd-parties can develop add-ins for it.

Absolute Radio are running a contest to win some of these up until launch day - see here for more information.

So - while the radio may have the outward design of a 1960s guess at a space-age gadget ... it does have abilities that are futuristic.

There are more good looking photos over at the Pure microsite site
What Hi-Fi has a video but it looked like a fairly slowly running UI. Probably late beta code with some time left to speed things up before release.

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