Great Gift
We purchased this as a gift for my son. We own one and it came in handy during the last storm when we were without electricity for 4 days. Everyone should have one of these for emergencies. As "stuff" happens. This is a great wedding gift too or Christmas.
Poor Design
Overall I'm unimpressed with the radio. Despite it being water resistant, the unit cannot be exposed to rain or moisture...(??). The battery cover is flimsy and does not close well leaving gaps for moisture to get in (so much for being water-resistant).
The controls are poorly aligned and placed. The OFF selection for the radio and light are located in the middle of the dial selection and are misaligned so that it's unintuitive how to turn them off. Moreover when you try and put the radio into its tiny carrying sack with not much room, invariably one of the knobs is pushed and the light or radio goes on...
Radio reception is good. I just hope that if you're in an emergency situation, it's a dry one...
Poor Customer Service
I bought a smaller Eton/Red Cross emergency radio/light. The unit came with a postcard to mail away for an adapter to fit your cell phone, so you can charge it in an emergency using the hand crank or solor panel. Weeks went by, nothing... Months went by, nothing.... Repeated calls (always got an answering machine), left details.... nothing. I am still waiting. I will say the unit works well, but I purchased it mainly for the cell phone charger, and without their custom phone "power tip" you're up the creek.
Nice, compact and works as described.
I got this radio as part of a deal that also gave me free wind-up flashlight. I had a five-day outage and we huddled around the radio in the evenings since everyone was out. Bad news is that this radio gets the analog TV signals currently but that will be gone in February, 2009 when all the signals covert over to digital...making this feature non-working after that date. The weather alert also is a good function and keeps on in our household.
Emergency Radio
Bought this to keep around in case the power goes out - have had it for a few months now and check it every so often - its been reliable so far. It is compact and has lots of features including a windup cell phone charger - only issue was you had to order the adapter for your phone and it took 2 months to come, but it was free.
