Pure's new palm-sized DAB/FM portable radio, called Move, has been designed with outdoor use firmly in mind. It'll happily pop in your pocket, but it also has a rear-mounted, hinged stand when it needs to be standalone.

Perhaps the most notable feature, however, is the incredible battery life. Use the supplied Li-on-equipped ChargePAK and the Move will provide over 40 hours of portable DAB listening from a ten-hour charge. A power adapter is included, too.

Move covers both digital and analogue bands, with full DAB III reception and decoding up to 192kbps. It offers ten presets each for DAB and FM and has a useful number of additional features for its size (width 15cm height 8.5cm, depth 2.7cm) and price.

These include a 3.5mm auxillary input, headphone output and something called textSCAN, which allows users to pause and control DAB scrolling text – useful should you need to 'name that tune'. FM benefits from RDS and there's also a USB input for future updates via PC.

Build quality is excellent: the fascia boasts a brushed-aluminium finish which fronts a soft-touch rubber main chassis. A central toggle switch controls volume, station search/select and textSCAN and there is a further pair of two-function control buttons that delve into menu, presets, info and DAB or FM operation.

Move's key-press-activated, orange-backlit LCD display is small, but legible and can be left permanently on if required. It displays 16x2 characters, plus a number of function icons. As part of Pure's EcoPlus family, the company claims an impressive 0.95-watt power consumption for Move, which might make you feel better in your main hi-fi is 'always on'.

Sound quality

Hi-fi it ain't, but let's get some perspective here; as palm-sized, ultra-portable radios go, Move has a very appealing sound quality, if in the classic 'tranny' mould. It's 50mm drive unit gives a typically small-scale bandwidth that eschews the frequency extremes and instead favours the all-important speech band.

Legibility with the spoken word is, therefore, very good. With headphones attached – we used our real-world reference Sennheiser HD 650s (£400) – the sound comes alive and shows the strength of Pure's electronics expertise; lets not forget that with the Evoke-1, Pure started the whole DAB thing off.

Go back to the internal speaker, however, and the lack of bass is inevitable. Orbital's Halcyon (from the new hits album, 20) at 128kbps on DAB had plenty of midrange drive and high-frequency bite, but was notably bass-shy. That said, Move has to be put in context – it's a 280-gram radio after all.

A move to Radio 3 in FM (test location five miles from the Wrotham mast in Kent) and things step-up, as you might expect. The gulf between FM and DAB – even at 192kbps – becomes obvious, especially with the HD 650s. Following a tune with the Move is easy, but speech is where it performs best.

For the money, Move is certainly fair value, especially when considering the built-in proprietary ChargePAK. In fact we've yet to come across a better-equipped, better-built radio with these tiny dimensions. It might not be bargain territory, but the superb construction, great feature count and two-year warranty certainly makes it worthy of a Best Buy badge in our eyes.

We're not going to beat around the bush: this update to Griffin's iTrip is the best in-car FM transmitter for iPods and iPhones that we know of. It blew us away with some excellent qualities.

The best feature is SmartScan, a one-button scanning feature that scans the airwaves and saves the three clearest results as preset channels.

This is a great time-saver; just press the preset option and take your pick from the three open signals.

Strong signal

A bright and friendly white-on-black LED display is on hand to help, and a very simple menu system controlled by three buttons is headache-free to operate.

Equally impressive is the signal strength, which was enough to strongly overlay Radio 1's 99.5FM signal. This means you won't have to flick channels to get a better reception.

The price is high, but the quality is undeniable. If you're in the market for kit to broadcast your iPod to your in-car radio, then look no further.

Pure's good reputation is further fuelled by brother number three in Pure's Evoke range. What differs from its forebears is the combination of a larger screen with massive recording capabilities - up to 1GB from its front-loaded SD card slot.

The times they are a changing

This gives you a total of 15hrs, with up to 20 timed recordings being set simply from the EPG that gives access to the next seven days' worth of radio listings.

However, the EPG is frustratingly slow to update. Also, there isn't even a small SD card included in the Evoke-3 package.

The secret behind the Evoke-3's overall success, is its simplicity despite that plethora of recording options. Its ReVu feature allows around 50mins of live radio to be recorded even without a SD card, and while its controls do sully the unit's otherwise clean appearance, its classy retro shell is appealing.

The same goes for the its D-shaped 3in drive unit speakers, which spew plenty of bass to accompany the full sound. Although dialogue is this DAB radio's main strength, the speakers behave well with music and a harshness only creeps in at very high volumes.

The Evoke-3 is also thoroughly portable, including a battery hub either for six size C batteries or a ChargePAK. Fully charged, a ChargePAK supplies around 10hrs of listening.

Connectivity is also strong. The USB input means that the radio's software can be updated online.

An optical audio output pipes sound to an amplifier, and analogue inputs and outputs mean that an iPod, CD player or MiniDisc can be connected. It can also play MP3s stored on SD cards.

Straightforward and innovative, the Evoke-3 can also be used as decent iPod speakers as well, despite the unit's chunky nature.

Two style icons in harmony: now there's a tale for the Naughties. If only it came in white.

Imagine if Apple released a budget version of its iPod that was made of black shiny plastic and didn't have a clickwheel - and cost just £50. That may not be Apple's style, but that's the approach Pure Digital has taken with its One DAB radio.

Basic instinct

Like the styling, the One's connectivity is basic, with just a headphone jack and a USB slot, the latter designed only for occasional software updates via Pure's website.

It's also got some nifty features. Intellitext allows you to select the latest headlines - in scrolling text format - from the world of Formula One, football and cricket.

Operating the basic DAB radio functions is easy, but different from other Pure radios. For starters, there's fewer buttons cluttering up the fascia. The central dial takes control depending on which satellite button is depressed, with the default control being volume.

The satellites choose between volume, stations, timer, station presets, main menu and toggling between DAB and FM reception.

Controlling volume itself is simple, yet on most Pure DABs it's possible to adjust it to the decibel - here there's ten prescribed sound levels.

Sound is basic but well suited to voice radio. A blast of Radio 5 Live in crystal-clear DAB is rounded and precise. As with most voice radio stations, the sound is mono and broadcast at a bit-rate around 80kbps, so the One's mono speaker actually does a very good job.

That doesn't quite hold true with music stations. Tuning in to BBC 6 Music, it's immediately obvious that there's not enough bass, but the soundstage is adequate, considering its single speaker treatment of a higher bit-rate 128kbps, stereo broadcast. At this price it's still better than we expected, though.

And that's a fair appraisal of the One. Cheap and cheerful in looks, it's easily the most advanced DAB radio in its class - of One.

Pure's good reputation is further fuelled by brother number three in Pure's Evoke range. What differs from its forebears is the combination of a larger screen with massive recording capabilities - up to 1GB from its front-loaded SD card slot.

The times they are a changing

This gives you a total of 15hrs, with up to 20 timed recordings being set simply from the EPG that gives access to the next seven days' worth of radio listings.

However, the EPG is frustratingly slow to update. Also, there isn't even a small SD card included in the Evoke-3 package.

The secret behind the Evoke-3's overall success, is its simplicity despite that plethora of recording options. Its ReVu feature allows around 50mins of live radio to be recorded even without a SD card, and while its controls do sully the unit's otherwise clean appearance, its classy retro shell is appealing.

The same goes for the its D-shaped 3in drive unit speakers, which spew plenty of bass to accompany the full sound. Although dialogue is this DAB radio's main strength, the speakers behave well with music and a harshness only creeps in at very high volumes.

The Evoke-3 is also thoroughly portable, including a battery hub either for six size C batteries or a ChargePAK. Fully charged, a ChargePAK supplies around 10hrs of listening.

Connectivity is also strong. The USB input means that the radio's software can be updated online.

An optical audio output pipes sound to an amplifier, and analogue inputs and outputs mean that an iPod, CD player or MiniDisc can be connected. It can also play MP3s stored on SD cards.

Straightforward and innovative, the Evoke-3 can also be used as decent iPod speakers as well, despite the unit's chunky nature.

Two style icons in harmony: now there's a tale for the Naughties. If only it came in white.

This tuner isn't new, but its 'street price' has fallen to £200 and new competitors have come along to challenge it. It also seems to have had one or two minor changes to its design.

The basic set-up remains the same, though: separate FM/AM and DAB modules feeding a common audio output stage, the whole lot powered by a conventional supply based on a small frame transformer.

Denon's analogue radio module comes from Chinese supplier Kwang Sung, now one of the biggest manufacturers of these devices. It's more highly integrated than older modules, putting out completely demodulated audio, thus relieving Denon's engineers of the task of RF engineering almost entirely.

The DAB module (from TBK) is similarly comprehensive, but outputs digital audio, which is converted to analogue by a Burr-Brown chip, a change from the Analog Devices part we spotted previously.

A particularly smart unit, the TU-1800 is also nice to use. The display is very easy to read and includes the error rate on DAB, the surest indicator of truly satisfactory reception. We love the 100 presets on FM - that's as many stations as the band is capable of holding!

What we really appreciate is the overall cleanliness of the sound. Some FM tuners get dirty at high audio levels, and some at low levels (and a few just sound dirty under all conditions), but this one manages to avoid that and is nicely clear, open and detailed under most circumstances. It's also tonally neutral, apart from a slight lightness in the bass.

The consistency in retrieval of detail across the dynamic range pays real dividends in making this a model one can listen to in comfort for long periods. It's quite good in terms of real close-up analysis too, but listenability without fatigue is a particularly welcome trait in a tuner, and the TU-1800 scores highly here.

It has no particular preference in terms of musical styles, but does seem to prefer music to speech, which can sometimes seem a little bland and uncommunicative.

Regardless of whether you're listening to pop, rock, jazz, classical, world music or whatever, there's always a good sense of real musicians playing real instruments.

Stereo imaging is reasonable rather than outstanding. On occasion sounds seem a bit bunched up in the middle of the soundstage, and depth is pretty limited - but then, it's seldom much to get excited about with most tuners. With that exception, though, this is a highly informative FM performer. Even AM is clearer than on most models.

Turning to DAB, we're slightly uneasy about a degree of veiling compared with the efforts of some of the others in the group. It's not vast, but somehow the clarity of good broadcasts is a little compromised. For all its limitations, DAB does some things well, and a low noise floor is one of them.

While we weren't consciously aware of any worsening of this, it seems that sounds are sometimes enveloped in a subtle haze of noise or grunge that just slightly reduces clarity and definition of individual instruments. We're being picky, though, and for many listeners, this minor flaw will be more than outweighed by the fine FM performance.

Attention to detail is the key to good product design, but someone ought to tell Roberts. Moulded to look like a jukebox, the MP-30 boasts a truly stunning array of features but looks so cluttered we wouldn't blame you for looking away now. The cheap plastic shell and protruding knobs and buttons take the shine off what is a rather advanced DAB radio.

For starters, it's not just DAB fans that are catered for. Alongside the fast auto-tuning DAB tuner is a FM radio - complete with radio data system (RDS) for station names and other info - and the ability to play digital music. On the side of the unit is an SD card slot that's able to take almost any size card, although Roberts kindly supply a 256MB version.

Aside from playing back MP3 and WMA files - which can be transferred to the card using the MP-30's USB port on the opposite side, or using a universal card reader on a PC - the card is also useful if you want to use any of the recording functions. Chief among them is PausePlus, Roberts' name for an orange button on the MP-30's side that is able to pause live radio for up to 30mins.

Below it is a record button, which allows any radio show to be recorded onto the SD card as a MP2 file. Better still, the EPG button opens up a seven-day electronic programme guide that lets you browse the schedules and set recordings at the press of a button. In practice, this only works with some BBC stations and the feature is frequently unavailable, but we can't blame Roberts for that.

Connectivity is actually very good and includes an optical digital output for connecting the MP-30 to an amplifier. Analogue phono outputs do a similar job. But for such a large radio, it's also a shame that only a mono speaker is provided, but at least it's good enough to offer a clear reproduction of voice radio. An unusual and welcome touch is the provision of bass and treble controls on the radio's side, which do prove handy, as well as a button that locks the unit to avoid accidental de-tuning.

More or less

But our 'more is less' feeling about the MP-30 continues with its huge orange screen. Easy to read, yes, but as well as being faulty on our review sample, it's crammed full of logos and instructions to tell you exactly what's going on. Do we really need the MP-30 to tell us that we're listening on our headphones, or that the unit is operating in secondary mode and is about to wake us up with a buzzer alarm?

No, we don't, and the oversized screen exposes the fact that although the features have been piled onto the MP-30, insufficient thought has gone into how easy, or enjoyable, it is to use. Five stars for features, but this frantic little fellow lacks the build quality and the streamlined elegance we'd expect in a £200 DAB radio.

There's something surreal about listening to Radio Dum Dum's lilting Hindi film tunes before tuning into a documentary on Native American Indian burial sites on Yellowstone Public Radio. But don't mistake this for a world radio. It's only able to tune to stations that already have an online presence, and those with a PC or Mac will already be able to listen online to everything this unit can supply.

It may have access to over 4,000 radio stations, but that's not all that's under the hood of this two-tone silver and black tabletop radio. On its side is an SD card slot that's capable of playing back MP3 files, although given the amount of faffing about that's needed to transfer files from a computer, it's a feature too far.

The reverse houses sockets that enable hook-up of almost any audio device - albeit only in analogue fashion - although an iPod or audio from a laptop seems the most obvious use. With no Ethernet port provided, internet connectivity is restricted to wireless, so if you don't already have WiFi this isn't a radio for you.

If you do, this unit is a real boon because it automatically detects your WiFi connection details, asks for a password and gets on with downloading the latest list of online stations. Such stations are available for searching alphabetically or by genre, but the daunting process of scrolling through by continent and country is lessened through the provision of a favourites list that's simple to configure.

This is important because the UK has hundreds of stations and the US over two thousand, while Kazakhstan and Uganda, for example, have just three and one, respectively. Menus can be sluggish and stations do take some time to buffer and occasionally drop out altogether, but that's something that will be familiar to anyone who's listened to radio stations on a PC.

If you tire of listening to Phil Collins introduced in Pashtan, another advantage of the WiFi connectivity is that this model can find and play MP3 or WMA music files from a public folder on any PC or Mac. There's also the chance to listen to recent podcasts from some stations on-demand: admirable versatility.

Low profile

Sound quality varies because of the different bitrate of stations - a lot are abysmally low, even some BBC stations - but there is also an FM tuner for audiophile quality. In any case, the speaker lacks bass but is able to play even the lowest quality material in a quality that's humbling given the raw material. The problems with this unit centre around design.

The dial is too small and scrolling through long lists of radio stations is a fiddly process, especially when looking for US radio stations (surely a state-by-state list would be better). The blue LCD screen is set too far back into the unit and occasionally hard to read if the radio is positioned direct line of sight. Despite some foibles we were sad to part from this Internet radio: the world awaits.

Top quality gear also comes at a price. In the case of Pure Digital's latest DAB radio, the Oasis, it's got nothing to do with money. Claiming to be waterproof, Pure's other suggestion that the Oasis is portable may be true, but personally we wouldn't want to lug this heavyweight around for too long.

At least its rugged carry handle is up to the job of supporting the Oasis' bulk. Superbly built, its portability may be a moot point, but of most interest is its rechargeability.

Simply plug the Oasis into the mains for a few hours and you'll get around 15 hours of DAB radio playback. That's down to the ChargePAK batteries inside, which is what also gives the Oasis its bulk.

Aside from attaching an iPod or MP3 player into the Oasis' side-mounted roster of ins and outs, DAB is all you can listen to: there's no FM reception possible.

Hidden behind rubber caps (for extra waterproofing) on the unit's right-hand side are not only that auxiliary input, but also a headphones jack and a USB port. Unfortunately, the latter is purely for connecting the oasis to a PC for downloading software upgrades from Pure Digital's website.

The layout of the Oasis makes it a model that's almost too easy to use. Clad in rubber, the centre of the Oasis is occupied by a overly large standby button that's backed-up by a green light, and it's flanked either side by volume and tuning knobs.

Five preset buttons lay beneath the two-line green LCD screen aside info and menu buttons for accessing the simple menus.

There's really no need to delve into the menus though, because the Oasis tunes in automatically and super-quickly to all DAB stations in the area. Switching between stations has never been easier: simply turn the knob to the desired station and press. It might sound like a sensible, run-of-the-mill feature but most DAB radios are needlessly fiddly to use.

Oddly, the malleable telescopic aerial can be removed by simply unscrewing it, although reception immediately breaks-up.

Freedom of speech

Sound quality - and this is a mono speaker, remember - is first-class. Speech radio is dealt with peerlessly for a DAB with a mono speaker, while it can cope with music at high volumes while remaining rounded and laden with just enough bass, although treble levels can grate at high volumes

The Pure Oasis is a rugged little DAB that performs well with anything DAB radio currently pumps-out. We can't honestly say that the Oasis is a portable option for the summer, but sit it in the kitchen attached to the mains or whip it into the bathroom minus the wire if you fancy a blast of music while you bathe, and it'll last forever.

It's splashdown time for Pure.

Unless you knew of its hidden talents, you'd never know this sleek black box was anything other than a great DAB radio. Behind its roster of novel features, such as playing MP3 files from a SD card or iPod, is a nifty tuning talent that makes it possible to listen to analogue radio stations from anywhere in the world.

Everyday use will be DAB, but delve into the menus and you'll find manual tuning that gets you access to MW, LW and SW. The system uses a digital radio mondiale (DRM) module that converts these analogue stations into digital format for clearer sound. There's no autotune, so you will have to manually trawl through the frequencies to find stations like BBC World Service or France's RTL.

Fringe benefits

Better still, the unit also benefits from a SD/MMC card slot and an electronic programme guide. It's possible to browse the EPG for up to seven days ahead and schedule recordings to be recorded - in MP2 format - onto a memory card, although note that no card is included in the box.

There's no internal memory either, so make sure you buy a memory card if you want to make any sort of recordings, including using the unit's dedicated controls for either recordings or pausing live radio.

When recording commences (only possible on DAB or DRM stations), the blue backlit LCD screen glows red. Note that it's not possible to rewind live radio, unless you're already recording it, and that you can only pause DAB radio for a little over five minutes (30mins for DRM stations).

If you accidentally choose to record while listening to an AM station, the unit should find the identical station on DAB, and start recording it.

In practice, this didn't work for us when selecting Radio 5 Live on AM.

Aside from its geographic and recording talents, the DRM radio is also versatile. A line in and line out in the radio's rear make it possible to attach an iPod, a laptop, PC or CD player, while also being able to route sound to an external amplifier if you so wish.

Quality street

Sound quality is crisp and precise, and although the DRM doesn't actually produce anything like CD-quality sound from LW or MW stations, music on DAB stations is well rounded and retains its coherence at high volumes.

The tuning knob is far too small for indulging in manual tuning, essential to the DRM aspect of this unit, and the blue LCD screen is set back too much, making it hard to read from anywhere other than at eyeline. But these are our only criticisms of what is a well constructed and fully featured digital radio.