R7705/10

Great Alarm clock, versatile alarm setting, such as weekday only or weekend only. Great options for snoozing and you can adjust the brightness of the display to match your needs. The DAB radio reception is great and simple to tune.

This *could* be a great little bedside radio alarm clock but had been let down but dreadful user experience design. I can only assume that this unit received no testing before being rolled out as there are some simply astonishing fails in the functionality. 1. You cannot set the radio alarm to a station of your choice - it will simply come on the first alphabetical station on the DAB band. You then need to scroll through the band to find your required station once it come on. Every time. Every day! Doesn't matter if you were listening to Radio 4 when you went to bed - it won't return to that when the radio comes on in the morning. Why? My last DAB alarm clock (also by Phillips) managed this so why not this one? A simply unforgivable oversight in the design process. FAIL! 2. The snooze button, which also doubles as a way to set the brightness of the display and which dominates the top of the box will override all other functions if accidentally pressed. For example, during the convoluted process of setting the alarm (which takes around 7 steps) if your fingers accidentally come into contact with the snooze button, the whole process is aborted. Simply infuriating!! I can't count the number of times this has happened. 3. Setting and recalling presets is annoyingly complex and frankly, impenetrable. I'm pretty good with tech, but I've simply abandoned using this shitty feature. Other than that, it's a good radio - good sound, charges your iPhone, bright easy to read to display, nice dual alarm function for weekend v weekdays alarm setting. If you're happy just using the radio to wake you up and having something that tells the time while charging your phone this will probably do. But if you want a device that contains well through through functions, don't want to wake up to music you can't stand and have a radio alarm clock and hasn't been designed by some idiot from IT then look elsewhere.

Wonderful sound quality, really easy to set up, looks great. Out of the box experience was very positive. I found it easier to play around with rather than follow the multilingual instructions. The buttons are very intuitive and the LED display is very, very well designed to help you through the menus. It's a DAB+ receiver, so you'll get all the available radio stations (Radio X recently went to DAB+ for example). That also means you get music in stereo. Unlike many earlier DAB radios which seemed to try their best to look retro and generally very naff, this looks modern and stylish. Sound quality is incredibly full with good base depth, but not too much to bounce you out of bed in the morning. In terms of alarms, this is excellent. You have two totally independent alarms with tonnes of options. You can choose to wake up to DAB, FM, Buzzer or Bluetooth (haven't used this feature). Each alarm can be set by volume, weekend/weekdays/daily (very cute feature means that you don't have to switch it off at the weekend). I have a Samsung S20. This radio supports fast wireless charging, which is excellent. There's a USB port on the side of you have a smart watch our other device to charge. The only concern I have is signal quality. We live in an elevated position with line of sight to Emley Moor transmitter where our regional DAB is broadcast from. The antenna needs to be positioned pretty precisely to gain optimum signal across all channels. I do wonder if we lived at the bottom of a hill whether we'd struggle for signal. I guess you should test this first if you have DAB in your car or another DAB radio. I'd try and borrow one to test before spending £80+ on one of these. Our signal is great now we have experimented with antenna location. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this alarm clock, but be aware of the signal strength in your area.

A decent radio with good sound and with charging for mobile phone, but slightly frustrating is the lack of instructions and fiddly to set initially. Also it does not save the last station when switched off and have to change it every time it is switched back on.

Alarms are really tricky to navigate - especially in low light as is often the case in the bedroom when perhaps turning the light on brightly to see the buttons is not an option. Radio quality is surprisingly good but it's annoying that one DAB station cannot be remembered by the unit so that when you turn it on, that station is automatically tuned-to. The unit always goes to the first alphabetical station in the DAB list - in my case - Absolute Radio. It's a question of then selecting a preset which one would have previously programmed and then a few button pushes to "tune" to it. The display is good - with three brightness pre-programmed levels and is large for those of us who wear glasses normally who don't wear them in bed. The radio setting is annoying and the alarm setting process is infuriating but apart from those two MAJOR things, the unit has a relatively small footprint and is convenient on a bed-side table. Just remember to set your phone AS WELL as the alarm to make sure the SOMETHING wakes you up.

The philips audio r7705/10 clock radio is a fantastic radio alarm. This is so easy to set up. I had no problem in the setups and adjusting. This radio alarm keeps precise time as expected. The looks of this radio alarm is so aesthetically appealing.This radio alarm is the perfect size ,not too small nor large. The functionality of it is so fantastic.

Quality product, easy to programme with clear sound and lcd display is clear

It’s not easy to find a good alarm clock radio: most of them sound dreadful. This one does not. It sounds pretty good. But try using it at night, when you’re in bed. You’d think anyone designing one of these would start by recognising that most of the time it’s likely to be used in the dark by someone who’s probably half asleep, so you’d expect it to be easy to use with your eyes closed. I suspect this Philips model wasn’t designed by a designer at all, because that basic level of common sense is just not there. Instead, a lot of small flat buttons have been dropped closely together, all on the top, in black on a black background. Then, to make things worse, one of the most frequently used functions has been made more difficult to use, while another is missing completely. Try changing the radio station at night to switch to one of your favourites. You have first to locate and then press 3 buttons to do so. That’s how the preset system works. It’s not easy to do in the dark, and there is a slight lag in response when you do so. If you get it wrong, however, you know immediately because you’ll end up with some station you don’t want to hear and you’ll probably have to turn on the bedside light to see how to stop the noise and try again. You may want to set the alarm so that it comes on to a different radio station to the one you’re listening to at night. Sounds perfectly reasonable, but you can’t do it with this device. You can program in a waveband but you can’t select a station. That’s a big oversight. The Philips R7705 does have some useful features, such as a battery back up so the alarm will still go off if you have a power cut. And bluetooth, so you can use the speaker to play stuff from your phone or iPad (great for adding more listening options beyond live radio). But the big clock display is probably too big, and not particularly good to look at, and it doesn’t matter how good the sound is if you can’t control it easily with a logical, well designed set of switches, or if basic functions are missing. It’s baffling how a ’20/21 product can be so ineptly done, when the sound quality could have made it a winner. EDIT: it's even worse than I thought when I wrote the review above. 1) I've now discovered that a power cut wipes out your presets, even if you have a battery installed to protect against a power cut. When that happens, you'll end up having to re-download the manual to reset it all. And then you'll want to throw the thing out of the window. 2) The alarm setting does not allow you to preset the volume level either. It simply fades up the sound and relentlessly turns up the volume to maximum. With this device, you have limited control over the station you wake up to, and none over how loud it is going to be. 3) The 'slight lag in response' to the controls is in fact a pronounced lag in response - it feels like 3 to 4 seconds of nothing happening at all. It's as antiquated as a wireless set of the 1950s. Except that this one is the 2020/21 model. A radio alarm clock is something you use everyday. In my experience this one is utterly infuriating. It is simply a box of electrical components thrown together without any thought for the user whatsoever.