Com One's Phoenix Wi-Fi radio is a home music appliance built on an embedded Linux foundation. Phoenix lets you stream music or play podcasts as easily as you can listen to a car radio, once you tell it what you want to hear. Its ability to play Internet radio is nice -- but is it worth its price?

The radio is attractive enough in a shiny white plastic kind of way. It's smaller than a boom box -- about the size of three transistor radios (remember them?) side by side. The main controls include a five-way circular control pad and a knob that changes the music volume and moves through device settings during setup.

I was eager to test Phoenix, but when I followed the Quick Start Guide's instructions for automatic network connection, the device said it couldn't connect to my Wi-Fi access point.

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