It's been a couple of months since I got this radio & I am satisfied with the purchase. I now rarely listen to the local stations. It's easy enough to switch to FM but I don't feel a need to. I have the radio tuned mostly to 181.fm I am tuned to the station that plays mellow gold. Adverts are rare & it's usually a community message about volunteering to be a dad, or donating to childrens education. These community messages are short & not annoying. The display on the radio tells me the the station is using bit rate is 128 kbps.
I have tried the Australian stations but tired of listening to all the car ads. I have tried tuning to malaysian stations but many of them don't allow people from outside to listen in. Some stations in Sabah have a combination of english, chinese & malay programing from the same station. Not my cup of tea as one can never tell when the english portion will be playing.
I have an iPad with the Tunein App which is pretty good. This will be useful when I travel. However for local use the radio is more handy since it has a larger speaker & doesn't need re-charging since I run it on AC power. My main gripe is that the radio uses a rocker switch for volume control. A knob would be more intuitive & faster.
There is sometimes a lag in the music but I don't know the cause. It could be due to my slow ADSL connection
I'm planning to upgrade my connection. Will see if it improves.
So if you have already got an internet connection, might as well use some of the bandwidth to listen to radio.