Home > Consumer Reviews > Sanyo R227 WiFi Internet Radio (Black)

I'm on this page to order my second Sanyo R227! I bought one for our Wyoming home as the only radio you can get here is Rush Limbaugh, Country and Western (not always bad...) and religious stations. Our other home is in the Bay area and we have lots of choices plus Sirius/XM. The R227 was easy to set up with our wireless and now we're "connected" to the world of radio. I used to be a shortwave listener but I think the Internet has dealt the death knell to that medium, save some sections of the world. The looks, design, sound quality all exceeded my expectations. Clearly we're in a new age for radio listening. I highly recommend this great receiver to anyone who loves radio.

I'll try and keep this to comments not made by others but I'll admit to not reading every one.

This is not a bedside radio since the clock light goes out after a few seconds. If you want to use it as a clock or alarm clock you will need to keep a flashlight handy to see the time when it is dark.

The Sanyo site will be glad to sell you one for retail but does not offer support. Makes me wonder how they evaluate products except by reading posts like this.

The dial that should control volume (what else do you adjust more often?) gives you a real puzzle palace of a menu. The volume "buttons" are hard to find and send the radio skidding across the table unless you use 2 hands to hold the silly thing while you modify the volume. The manual is handy for starting a small fire on a cold morning.

I you have a wireless signal where you want to use this, it may not work. My laptop works great in the bedroom but I had to buy a range extender so the signal was strong enough for this radio.

Once I did that it worked as expected but I still think there is a major redesign required and no way to have input with Sanyo. In my experience Sanyo is a price point brand that has a "we-make-it,you-buy-it" approach to the market

My opening statement may appear to be a thumbs down on this product,but please read on: I absolutely hate the cheap built in speakers. Manufacturers have been incorporating junk speakers in high quality electronic devices for ages. Fortunately,you can bypass the speakers. There are 3 options as describe in the manual. I connected my Tivoli radio by Henry Kloss to the Sanyo R227 via input/output mini-jacks resulting in superior audio from the one tiny Tivoli speaker.

I returned the R227 due to damage and requested a replacement. In other words I resisted an an opportunity for a refund,because the radio is worth keeping. I also have an internet radio built into my Nokia E63 smart phone that I connect to my Tivoli, or stereo home system. For some of you the Nokia E63 might be a better option when you consider price and all the extras you have with a smart phone, but I considered the shortened battery life and the risk of dropping my Nokia to be too risky for me. If you use the internet radio only occasionally, buy the Nokia E63 it's a bigger bang for the buck. I just love the Nokia E63.

One last thing the Sanyo manual is good, but you can figure out the radio functions without it. On the other hand the Nokia E63 manual stinks, but boy is the Nokia worth the extra mile.

P.S. I'm listing to the R227 right now. In my opinion it's worth the money. My only gripe is those cheap speakers.

It didn't take me long to hate this unit. I unpacked the box to find a nice looking piano-black unit, well-packed and pretty small in size. So far, so good. Since I already have a Logitech Squeezebox, and am already fairly geeky, I knew setting this thing up should be pretty easy. I guess I should not have made that assumption because it was anything but easy to set up and use. Instead of spreading out the "pros" and "cons" before you. I'll just enumerate my findings.

1. The remote: Small. Unbelievably bad placement of controls. The cursor controls are not grouped together (lower left side) and the select buttong is WAY up top above a very large Sleep button (which should have been the Select button). Whoever thought up this design should return their pay for creating this contraption.

2. The display: Looks OK, until you start navigating it. It is fairly hard to read with the bluish backlight. I could actually read the display with the backlight off

3. Nagitation: Awful, simply awful. It seems that each time you start looking for a station it has to go out ro Reciva to grab the list. That takes time. In my case it took about a minute to retrieve 1850 stations. So, the list comes up and the fun begins. There are a handful of stations that I like and listen to on the Squeezebox. It took me less than 10 minutes to set them up on that box, and I can also use the web ui to configure them via a browser. That isn't the case with this machine. I had to scroll through the list looking for the stations I wanted. When I found them and attempting to listen to them, I could not connect. Trust me, this isn't a connection issue since my Squeebox works flawlessly on the same network. It is very rare that I have connection issues with the Squeezebox; very rare. When I finally was able to connect to a station at random, the quality was just OK and uninspiring. OK, I know, "what do you expect?". Well, I guess I was going to be as thrilled as other people who stated their love for this thing. Me? Not so much.

4. Network Performance: When you start up the device it goes out hunting for a connection and it typically takes two or three minutes to even know it's connected. Perhaps it is trying to connect to [...] and that site is slow; I don't know. But it's crappy. When I attempted to connect to a remote server where my MP3 files are it wanted me to enter a user name to the share (I was using Windows Shares, not Windows Media sharing). It left me on the screen where I enter the user name, but I had not clue how to move to the next step (like the password). There was nothing in the docs that tell you how. Silly me, for not using Windows Media.

5. Firmware Upgrade: I upgraded the firmware and that took about 10 minutes. The screen jumped around spasmotically with the update stats at 7% intervals.

6. General UI: The UI (display) wasn't well thought out. At one point I had two scrolling sentences on the SAME line. When the characters collided they washed each other out. Very buggy. Uncool.

7. On Radio Controls: Although a little easier to use than the remote, the on-radio controls are a cock-up as well. Back button, select buttons, a ring that contans some push buttons (but you can't really tell until you press on the plastic). Who thought this up? If like somebody just thrown the controls randomly and the box and that's where they stayed. Never mind about the logical placement ("let see, if they press the up arrow to make a menu selection, maybe we should put the select button close to the cursor so they don't have to move their fingers far or have to use two hands").

How long did I have the unit? About 1 hour. I figured if that this device is so frustrating at the start why saddle myself with this thing for 5 or 10 years?

I've noticed that often a company's website can be an indication of how well the company is run. Go try to find the on-line manual for this unit. It's there. But start at [...] and go on a little easter egg hunt to find the manual. Finding the manual was similar to trying to figure out how the unit worked; frustrating.

My 2 cents. Sorry Sanyo. Take a close, magnigied look at the unit. It looks stylish zoomed out, but zoom in and you will see what I mean about the user-interface. Simply maddening.

I have a straight on ethernet connection DSL. It connects Anything, any OS or browser.
It would not connect this even on auto settings. You might have luck with your connection if its Bresnan
or some big outfit.. but you CANT count on this working right out of the box. IT SUCKS.
Dont buy a crappy internet product in 2009 when any other product will connect immediately.