Sony ICFCL75IP

Clock frozen and no out of warranty support from Sony Australia – The unit was purchased Dec 2010, but now has now suffered a permanent clock freeze. Has the latest firmware installed. Contacted Sony Aust who were helpful up until the point it was identified as being out of warranty (7 mths past). Customer support told me it could be inspected for $66 fee however this model is identified on their list of products that are uneconomical to repair. Disappointed that I paid $230 for supposed Sony quality only for it to last less than 2 years. And to wipe their hands of it, not good enough Sony... Was good up to the point when the clock froze.. Clock has permanently frozen without a solution from Sony to get it working again.

Terrible – I would not buy the units again, if you need to rely on the alarm clock to wake you up, don't buy it. Mine may have been from a bad batch its up to you to take the risk. LCD Screen, looks good I have two units and both have frozen during the night on separate occasions causing us to be late to work. The iPod dock sometimes comes up with the error, this is not a genuine iPhone product would you like to put the iPhone into airplane mode. I have updated the firmware on both and still have the same problem.

Terrible – This unit might look slick and have a great range of features, but it isn't worth $20, let alone the hundreds I did pay. Would not use this product again if you paid me!!! Not happy Jan! Great features including two separate alarms so you can have one for the weekdays and another for weekends and the brightness dimmer button. Continually freezes. I bought mine in Nov 09, had it replaced within the 12mth because of this fault and the new one does it too! And now when it won't necessarily power up again when you go to reset it. It might have plenty of features to satisfy just about everyone's tastes and habits (I don't really use the iPod dock), but that's no good if it can't keep it together and just work on a basic level.

Good – I searched for a long time to find a clock radio with ticks in all the boxes. I hate the standard clock radios with crappy LED numbers and low tech features!! This unit comes very close to having all those ticks I was looking for. As I don't use the iphone dock all that often the CON mentioned above doesn't really concern me all that much. As a clock/alarm/photo display - it's near perfect! Clock radio functions very well and is adjustable in all the areas you need it to be & the big time numbers are great for a large room.

The dimming function for night is very clever - set it to the lowest of 4 brightness settings and after 5 seconds the screen dims again almost to black, the wallpaper or slideshow of pictures goes switches off and a faint ghost image of the clock is visible. In a dark room at night its perfect for sleeping (no disturbance from a too bright clock but visible should you need to see it). Hit the snooze button and all is restored to daytime brightness.

1GB onboard is plenty enough for pics (especially when you reduce the res to the screen 800x600 pixels) but gets used quickly with movie files

The USB & card ports are very handy.

The menu's are clear and easy to navigate

It's compact enough in size to live comfortably on a bedside table next to a lamp or novel without taking over the space completely as many of the clock radio/iphone docks are prone to do. The sound quality from the onboard speakers is just passable, but for a very compact bedside clock you can't expect Bose Wave Radio quality.

You cannot copy files back from the unit to the USB/card port

The buttons don't have distinguishable raised feel making it hard to know if you're using the right button in the dark.

1GB is enough for only a couple of decent sized video files - memory is cheap, another 3GB would be great.

Since upgrading our iphones to iOS4.0 the unit has had compatibility issues with docking. The charge function of the dock operates as normal, but every 20 seconds a message is splashed up on the iphone's screen letting you know "the device connected to the iphone is incompatible". There is a firmware upgrade availble on Sony website which was released in July 2010. I have not installed this yet - Also I have not tested this with iOS4.0.2 so I'm hoping these 2 upgrades fix the bug.