Review on 📻 Retekess HR11W Digital NOAA Weather Radio: Solar Bluetooth Radio with Wind Up, Phone Charger, TF Socket, SOS Alarm – Red, Emergency Radio for Hurricanes by Jay Hill

First a few positive aspects. The battery lasts a long time. I used it extensively over the weekend and the battery didn't run out. How a daily alarm works for weeks. Radio works very well, AM/FM and weather bands. The speaker is really good in volume and sound quality for such a small device. All declared functions work! I think the solar panel is a little useless, but it won't hurt. I have to give two stars for the user interface and the somewhat flimsy firmware. Replacing a few buttons with an encoder wheel and deleting the menus would do wonders. The menu layout and required button presses are quirky at times. The most obvious example is that browsing music folders on SD card becomes slower while music is playing and for some strange reason you can't find a song to play when the music is not playing. (Sounds so crazy I had to test it again. When it's in MP3 mode it always plays music unless you pause it. When a track ends it always plays another track or repeats. If it's paused, the menu shows options to delete the current track than the normal browsing functions, so the only way to find a new track is when the track is currently playing.) My biggest complaint (since that's definitely one kind of bug) is that the alarm feature doesn't work if the device isn't turned on on purpose for a week or so. Since I only had to press a button to turn off the alarm and get on with my day, I decided to turn it on every day to see if it cleared any bad flags or something. I had to get used to turning it on for a short time after turning off the alarm. The alarm has worked every day since I started it. In addition, the alarm functions are rather weak. No snooze and just a customizable alarm. On the other hand, they offered the possibility of playing mp3 as an alarm ringtone. I suspect that the firmware developers (developers?) just didn't have much time to make it really good and polished. Hopefully future versions will fix the firmware and make this product reliable.