The Logitech Squeezebox Touch’s name should give you a mighty big clue as to what’s new in this addition to the music streaming series of gadgets. Gone is the tiny one or two line panel of old to tell you what’s playing. In its place is a vibrant, wide touchscreen designed to make rifling through your entire music collection a cinch. But with a screenless remote included, does it actually make it any more convenient? Read on and find out in the touchscreen and build section of our Logitech Squeezebox Touch review.
Read the rest of our Logitech Squeezebox Touch review
Logitech Squeezebox Touch review: Home music streaming sorted?
Logitech Squeezebox Touch review: Internet radio and widgets
The first time you set up the Logitech Squeezebox Touch, you’ll likely be smitten by the build and easy setup. We love the smooth black colouring, and the angled design is solid and perfectly sloped to make tapping in the odd search or login easy. The screen is sharp and reactive to all your prods, which won’t push it over as it’s perfectly balanced, and there are USB and SD card slots if you want to plug in your music collection without a router in the house.
Hooking up the Logitech Squeezebox Touch to your home network is quick and painless though, and it’ll belt out just about every digital audio format through the speakers you connect. The display also makes navigating through the bundled widgets, like Facebook, as easy as you could hope, and we can actually see how you might occasionally glance at your news feed this way whilst cooking, say.
What won’t become clear until you use the Logitech Squeezebox Touch for an extended period of time though is that it may not make streaming music around your home any more convenient, purely because to choose any song you like, you’ll have to go up to where it’s plugged into the mains, and select. And if you’re going to get up and do that, you might as well choose from your PC screen instead.
This problem could be rectified with the remote that comes bundled with the Logitech Squeezebox Touch, but unfortunately, it’s clearly a cheap solution cobbled together to make the much more expensive Squeezebox Duet remote accessory seem like a good buy.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the buttons on the AAA battery powered remote, though requiring line of sight is a bit of a pain in the age of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connected controls. But unfortunately, the lack of a screen makes the finger friendly display on the Logitech Squeezebox Touch unit itself almost redundant. Sure, using the remote triggers a slightly larger font, so you can see what you’re browsing through from slightly further away, but it’s not ideal. In order to scroll through all your available albums, radio stations and more, you’ll have to get up and walk over to the Logitech Squeezebox Touch and choose every time, unless you line up playlists first, which the more lazy music fans may not be inclined to do.
The remote control situation wouldn’t be such an issue if Logitech simply offered up a mobile app to let you use a touchscreen phone as a remote with cover art (Sonos has a fully featured iPhone app which does just that). As it stands, there’s no official option to do this with the Logitech Squeezebox Touch. You can use the web browser remote control in Safari on an iPhone or iPod touch for some limited control without having to get up (But not on the stock Android browser – we tried). Or you can use one of several paid for iPhone apps , the most well reviewed being the £5.99 iPeng. But if like a large percent of the population, you don’t have an iPhone, you’re more or less stuck with the old school IR remote bundled with the Logitech Squeezebox Touch.
All of this could have been avoided simply by making the screen on the Logitech Squeezebox Touch detachable. We’d love to be able to pull it out, take it with us and leave it on the sofa to leaf through while listening to music, but no. That’s likely to be a real dealbreaker for most people, but if you’ve already got a Squeezebox set up at home (And a Duet), there’s no denying this could make a perfect, if expensive, bed side or work desk music system.
Read the rest of our Logitech Squeezebox Touch review
Logitech Squeezebox Touch review: Home music streaming sorted?
Logitech Squeezebox Touch review: Internet radio and widgets
