TerraTec's Noxon iRadio has a front face that doesn't, at first glance, give too much of the game away. With a minimal number of front-mounted controls and a design that harks back to the look of the radios of yesteryear, it'd be fair to query just what it was hiding.

A fair bit, as it happens, and the clues start to emerge when you first take a glance at the included remote control. While hardly a beast of a device, it does nonetheless boast a fair array of buttons that afford better clues to the iRadio's capabilities. And when you turn the physical device itself round to discover a network port on the back, the picture becomes complete.

In short, the Noxon iRadio is designed to be able to fit into your kitchen or lounge, yet stream media - wired or wirelessly - from the Internet or a PC. The setup is quite easy, although you'll need to enter security details via the aforementioned remote if you're utilising the wireless connectivity on a secured network, but that done you'll quickly find you can pick up a mighty selection of Internet radio stations.

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They're grouped by country of origin, as revealed by the display on the front of the Noxon iRadio, and you simply scroll through the list and pick what you want. While you have to get a little closer than we'd have liked to read the modest display, it's still a simple device to navigate your way around.

Favourites can be stored, or you can choose to play back MP3 or WMA files that are stored on your computer, assuming everything is set up properly. That's pretty much the limit of the file support, though, and we'd suggest it's an area where TerraTec could usefully improve the device with future iterations. iTunes users in particular are likely to be quite unhappy.

Still, the iRadio, given its fairly comfortable size, does emit quite a punch through its speaker, and that came as quite a pleasant surprise. Granted, it's no substitute for a separate speaker set up - although the connectivity options are there if that's what you'd prefer - but we found the output to be clear and loud enough to fill our, er, test kitchen.

Yet while we quite liked the Noxon iRadio, and certainly found it to be quite a useful device when testing, we're not sure that its price tag of around £140 would tempt us particularly. It's certainly a flexible, compact and surprisingly powerful piece of hardware, retro-looking but we're firmly classing it as a luxury until the price drops at least down to two figures.

Interesting, quite innovative, simple to use and effective in operartion. That price tag is a worry, though.