Hands-on with the PURE Digital Chronos II

PURE Digital's original Chronos bedside digital radio scored an impressive 8 out of 10 last year. It was also nominated for our prestigious 2006 Editor's Choice award. Its cute design, ease of use and good price point earned the Chronos our respect. Now we've got hold of its successor, the Chronos II.

At first glance you might not notice much difference between this and its younger brother: it's the same shape, same colour, same price and has the same button layout. But there are a couple of changes under the hood. Firstly, the Chronos II has FM radio in addition to DAB, something that lost the original model a few marks. Including FM means, obviously, your radio enjoyment needn't be sacrificed when you're out of DAB coverage.

The Chronos II also boasts PURE's 'EcoPlus' tag, meaning it supposedly consumes less power than the competition. We're always sceptical with claims of this nature, so we'll let you know in our full review what our tests reveal. Should it live up to its tree-friendly promises, the Smarties at our sister site SmartPlanet will certainly be impressed.

Setup is extremely simple. Even old Mrs Johnson at the old folks' home stands a good chance of getting this up and running herself, and she's not even a real person. There's a bunch of preset slots for saving your favourite stations and multiple alarm options. Sadly, there's still no battery-operated option -- while the primary use of this triangular radiotelegraphy machine is as a home radio, it could so easily have been used when camping, for example.

You can expect our full review very soon, but so far we're very impressed with the Chronos' successor. It's available now for a very reasonable £70, with info on stockists at the PURE Web site. -Nate Lanxon

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