Looking for a decent clock radio that is iPhone 3G certified? So was I. So my wife gave me one of these for my birthday – but is it any good?

Although the iPhone holds all my favourite music, I still prefer waking up to the radio – mainly so I can hear the news. At night, though, it’s nice to have some iPod music, so I started looking for a clock radio that was also an iPhone dock. That way, I wouldn’t need two sets of speakers by the bed.

It turns out that there are quite a few iPod-compatible clock radios out there, but not many that are iPhone compatible. The difference is that an iPhone-compatible device has extra shielding, to prevent the annoying bip-bippy-bip-bip-bip noise that you get when a mobile phone comes near a speaker.

So that narrowed my choices down – and then when i started looking at the few that were left, almost all of them had pretty poor alarms. I eventually settled on the iHome IP99, as it had the ability to set an alarm that only worked Monday to Friday – most other clock radios only gave you the ability to set one alarm that went off every day. That might be OK for most people, but I’d spent the last few years with a Pure Bug DAB radio which let me set a different alarm for every single day, if I wanted – so I wasn’t used to turning off the alarm for the weekend.

So, after living with it for six months, what do I think of it?

Sound

The IP99 produces really nice sound. Whether it’s presenters talking, or music from the iPhone, the sound is very impressive for something that’s quite small. I can turn it up to louder-than-a-bedroom-needs levels and it doesn’t distort. I’m not an audiophile, though.

Operation

Here’s where the problems start to appear. The IP99 has a pretty simple button layout – most of the controls are on the top of the radio. A very nice touch is the little switch on the back, which instantly flips it between GMT and BST. It only gets used twice a year, but it’s so simple you wonder why more companies don’t do it. The IP99 comes with a remote control, but I don’t use it because this is a clock radio – not a home entertainment centre. It’s right beside my bed; I don’t need a remote!

Sadly, the rest of the iHome IP99 isn’t as well thought out.

Let’s start with the volume and tuning controls – these are large rings that surround the Power and Play/Pause buttons. If you want to adjust the volume in the dark (like if you’re trying to go to sleep, or don’t want your alarm so loud) then you end up slapping your hand onto the top of the radio and sliding it around until you find the ring, and then trying to rotate it – the rings are very smooth and you have to press down to get them to move. First off, it’s far too much work for what should be a very simple job, and secondly, it’s too easy to end up turning the radio off – and if it was in “alarm” mode, you’ve just lost your snooze capability.

Speaking of snooze, the snooze bar doubles as the control for the light intensity. The IP99 follows the annoying trend that a lot of manufacturers have jumped on recently; that of having a backlit LCD display. You have to wonder if any of them actually test these things; if they did, they’d realise that a backlit LCD is basically a big light – not ideal for an alarm clock! Even at the lowest brightness setting, the IP99’s display is too bright to have by the side of your bed. I’ve ended up turning off the light altogether. If I need to know the time in the night, I can press the snooze bar to turn it on again, which is OK, but it comes on at full brightness – I then have to press it another six or seven times to turn it off again. And, since it’s the snooze button, if you do that when the alarm has activated, you’ve just snoozed it.

The problems don’t stop there – even the seemingly simple act of choosing an input has been ruined. You can switch between radio stations by pressing one of the three radio buttons to access a stored channel. If you’re not listening to the radio at the time, pressing the button will switch over to the radio. Similarly, pressing the line-in button will switch you to the line-in socket (useful for attaching something that isn’t an iPod) or, if you’re on line-in, it will switch you back to the radio. But, and here’s the weird bit, there is no way of switching to the iPhone’s dock input. You CAN press the play/pause button, but this is less than ideal – it activates the iPod playback function; useless if you don’t want to listen to the iPod! If you want to listen to, say, internet radio via an App in the iPhone, you have to press the play/pause button, go into the iPod app, stop playing, come out of the iPod app, switch to the radio app and then play. A simple way around this would be to have the line-in button double as a “dock input” button – press once for line-in; press again for dock – simples. But no, iHome make it hard. Why do you need another way of switching to the radio?

If you’re lucky, sometimes you can get the iPhone’s non-iPod audio by launching whatever app you want, and then docking the iPhone into the IP99 – after a few seconds it will usually detect the iPhone and switch the input for you, but not always. And on some of the occasions it does switch, it will also start playing the iPod as well as whatever other app you’re running- very annoying.

Finally, there is one last problem – and it’s the biggest: the IP99 is not suitable for use with an iPhone 3G. There are two reasons why I say this: First, sometimes the iPhone will pop up that little “This device is not iPhone compatible” message when you dock the phone. Oopsy. Second, the IP99 STILL emits the horrible bip-bippy-bip bip-bip-bip noise if the radio is on while the iPhone is docked. It’s OK if you’re using the iPod, but terrible if you want to listen to the radio. And it does it LOUDLY. Even if the IP99 is turned off, you can still hear it – especially at night. When you’re trying to sleep.

So, to sum up:

Pros

• Great sound
• Remote control is pretty comprehensive

Cons

• Terrible controls
• Not iPhone-friendly
• Display is too bright for bedside use
• No way of switching to iPhone input

Opinion: Don’t bother