Rating: 
Summary: AWFUL customer support!
Review: I was able to get the internet radio features of this unit up and running with little trouble, but ran into a snag when I tried to install the feature that allows the unit to play mp3s from your computer hard drives. Although the web site promised a macintosh version, I discovered only after buying and registering the unit that there is none posted. There's even a link on their web site that says "click here to download the PC Link software for macintosh" but it leads to nothing. Over the past 10 days, I've been on the phone 3 times with philips customer support, and it is clear that their representatives have little or no experience with the products they are in charge of. Really quite shocking for a company with Philips' generally good reputation. After this 3rd call, they have promised once again to "call me back," but I have little confidence that they will. I still haven't received an answer to my question, but I'll post a new review if I ever do. Right now, I'm stuck with a machine that only does 1/2 of what it promised. --- The update, as promised: I returned this stereo to Amazon after Philips still couldn't address my question and the 30 days were up. Interestingly, I have noticed that Philips has removed one of the links on www.streamium.com that promises a Macintosh download. However, the site is still chock full of references to a Macintosh version, and is a blatant case of false advertising.
Rating: 
Summary: Zero stars
Review: I was completely flummoxed by this complicated product with an absolutely impenetrable instruction manual. I have 3 college degrees, I consider myself computer literate, but this was beyond my imagination. Simple instructions were nowhere to be found. During the set up, the screen said to choose one of two options, I knew which one I wanted but I could not find out how to make the selection. The instructions for making selections must be far separated from the actual tasks described - I could not find it. This product is made in China and I believe the instruction manual was written there also. Avoid this one like the Chinese plague.
Rating: 
Summary: Pleasantly Surprised
Review: I was very apprehensive to buy this based on the reviews of this and similar streaming music products. However, I found it at a local store for $227 and decided to try it, figuring I could return it if necessary. I bought it Saturday and started trying to get it to work Sunday. It wasn't nearly as bad to set up as I imagined. I followed others advice and first connected it via Ethernet to get the latest firmware upgrade (it only took a minute to download and was effortless). The Wireless was a little tricky, but I did get the 128 WEP to work, but only after turning the system off and back on. The only other "issue" was my firewall, but I changed one setting as recommended on Phillips website and I was off and running. The sound is great and the connection is very fast, I can breeze through my 6000+ MP3 collection with no delay. The Internet radio sounds better than I was expecting. The only thing that would make this better is the capability to play WMA file types. Otherwise, I'm very pleased with the purchase and would highly recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: a clarification
Review: Just to expand on what tariq77 said, I think he's saying that WEP keys don't have to have letters, they can be all numbers. However, the Streamium DOES allow you to enter WEP keys with letters or even capital letters. (Using your remote, cycle through the first set of letters to see the uppercase set. Unfortunately, its lower case and upper case do look a lot alike.) Also, I will confirm that the initial firmware upgrade seems to abort early. If you retry it, it will get farther into the upgrade before aborting. After a couple of times, it gets the whole thing. Awkward? Yes. But if you know it's coming, you won't panic like I did. Again, this product is a little buggy. But you should be able to work past the bugs quickly if you know what's coming. I'm now enjoying it bug-free. Too bad Philips doesn't have a better support web site.
Rating:
Summary: A must have. Easy to set-up.
Review: Maybe they have changed things since the earlier reviews, but I founf the wireless networking easy to set-up. This system is incredible. Everything about it is good, and I recommend it to anyone with a large music collection on their computer. I don't think I could live without it now.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best internet steaming devices I've used
Review: Mine finially came this week. Waited 3 weeks for it. Philips needs to improve this. I agree with the previous reviews, it's not easy to set up do to lack of information. But once you get past the setup, its a great device. Very fast booting up and connecting to your network. Execellent sound. Very clean display. And easy to use. My eight year old was able to operate it with little instruction.
Some hints for new users. Don't try to connect using a wireless network when you first boot up. It will be easier if you update the units software first (which does automaticlly on first boot when connected to a network) then change to wireless. Web encryption was easy with the new software.
Don't install Philips version of musicmatch from their site. Install the one from musicmatche's site, version 8.2 has the philips streaming option.
[...]
Rating:
Summary: Great sound and and a dream product!
Review: Small in size yet great sound!
Pros:
small, great design, great sound great featurs, unbeatable price.
cons:
* Software for computer sucks! it is so cruel and slo and is missing basic features like search for song by keyword. It will also not reccognize all tipes of tags for song info which means you have to often label the songs manually.
* instalation is tricky and support is no good. I had a problem setting up the wep key for the wireless connection. it just wouldn't accept it. I called support but they kept teling me I should call my router manufacturer. After playing arroung with the setting for a great long while I figured out that the stereo will take the code in ASCII while the router took it in HEX. this was easy to fix once I figured it out.
Botton line: great product worth the money. Note that philips will soon come out with a "higher end" wireless broadband system which will have better speakers and 3 CD changer.
Rating:
Summary: Cool but definitely first generation, and support is abysmal
Review: The concept behind this unit is neat -- a wireless connection to your home network, with access to your MP3 library and the Internet all in one. Unfortunately, Philips implementation is extremely poor. Configuration is clumsy and time-consuming, the documentation is sparse. Their tech support appears to be on a call-back basis only (I suspect they only have one technician that supports this product), and they seem to call back at 10pm eastern a lot. I have yet to actually speak to one of their techs, but given the sparsity of the manual and their web site, I don't hold out much hope. I had a lot of trouble getting the unit to talk to my Linksys router. Eventually I disabled WEP and I finally got it working, but not without a lot of searching through menus and submenus to find the options I wanted. Running an unencrypted wireless network is foolish, and if that's the only way to get this unit connected, I'll just skip it and use it as a regular (expensive) shelf-top system. The PC-based music server software supplied with the unit (or downloaded from their web site after you finally get it all configured) is MusicMatch, but it's a custom version that's several revs behind and there are no updates available. When I installed it on top of the current version of music match, the burner broke. It took me several uninstalls and reinstalls to get it all back in working order. Needless to say, the documentation doesn't even mention MusicMatch. The advertisements claim that the clock on the unit updates itself automatically from an Internet time source, but it doesn't, and the documentation doesn't even mention the feature. If you're a techno-geek, you love gadgets for their own sake, have plenty of cash to burn and plenty of left hair to pull out, go ahead and buy one of these just to say you did. Otherwise, wait until someone comes out with a better product that they are able to support.
Rating:
Summary: Wow! I have been waiting for this kind of thing......
Review: This box is just great. Why didn't they make this
a couple of years ago? Are you an internet radio fan? Are you sick of your
CD collection? If you answered yes, then you should
buy this. The box connected up to my wired internet connection
(have not tried wireless yet) with no problem and
I could immediately access hundreds of stations on
live365.com. I had to bootup my computer in the past.
Now I can just do it on my 250 boombox. And listen to
hours of music. This has been the best product I have
bought in years (after my DVD player that i got 7 yrs ago).
I am really jazzed about it. The product looks slick. The Woomx feature makes a
significant difference to the sound quality. Also, when you play one of your CDs, it connects
up to the internet and downloads track information! My only complaints are that it has only a single CD disk
player and doesn't have CD-RW capability (for making
your own MP3 compilations) and it is 100W output capacity.
Otherwise, I love this thing.
Rating:
Summary: Works as advertised. Read if you have problems
Review: This system rocks! It's hard to explain how cool it is, owners of Tivo might relate to this: you have to use it and then you'll ask yourself how could you listen to your music any other way. Some cool things:
- some radio stations allow you to skip songs
- tens of station available for free
- it will download album info even for you CDs
- supports multiple users, each with their own favorits
- it will sync its clock using a time server over the Internet. The poster that mentioned that this feature is not available is mistaken: one just needs to turn the setting on from his/her account on my.philips.com
- more featurs than you can imagine The only problem is that the manual SUCKS, especialy when dealing with network setings, so here's some usefull info:
- the system works with WEP but only 64bit (aka 40bit). It doesn't works with 128. To ensure that your wireless is very secure, make sure that you enable WEP (64bit is still quite secure, unless you're a top secret agency, in which case don't use wireless), set authentication to Open (not Shared), change yor SSID from whatever default value (eg linksys) to something else, turn broadcast SSSID to off, change yor default router admin password. Last, but not least, read yor router's manual and see how you can filter MAC adddresses and allow only the ones fir yor devices (including the Philips Streamium) - however, if you follow the other setting, this one is optional only.
- when entering the WEP keys on the Philips Streamium you MUST to use UPPER CASEs, even though it shouldn't mattter, since those are hex values. Use the remote control to enter them. Good luck all, and enjoy this super cool product!
| 
