iHome iW1 Airplay Wireless Review
By 
Our first impression of the iHome was that the company spent some time recreating that feeling you get when you first open a product package from Apple. The iHome iW1 comes with minimalist packaging very similar to Apples approach to the way they pack their products. Even the manual comes separately packed and the presentation is done very nicely.
The iW1 has a very nice weight to it and the bottom sits well on the surface you put it on without sliding around. If you have young kids, this is a nice feature that you will appreciate. The unit itself has a nice sleek design with an easy to use control panel on the lower backside. The panel has a battery button which causes the volume indicator to show you the current charge of the internal battery, a power switch to turn the unit on and off, an AUX input, a USB iPod dock connection, a status LED, and a network setup button for streaming your music.
The system also comes with a charging base that only requires that you sit the unit on making it very easy to “dock” for charging. This approach makes it very easy to just pick up the unit and take it with you wherever you want around the house without having to plug/unplug anything.
Set up was fairly easy and straightforward. Getting the iW1 to stream via AirPlay requires that you have a Wi-Fi connection. iHome provided a free app called iHome Connect that you download to your iOS device. Once you connect to your network, the setup for AirPlay only takes a minute and you can start streaming audio to the iW1 simply by selecting the AirPlay button on your devices screen.
Controlling the music and adjusting the volume, pausing, forward, reverse all work well with iTunes and works without any hiccups.
All of those things are what you would come to expect from a product priced at $300. The real question is though, how does it sound?
We found in our tests that the iW1 performed well at low to medium volume. The treble and mid range sounds nice and full, but the low end bass could be improved. At reasonable volumes, the sound gives a nice sense of fullness. Bass and percussion can be heard easily without any muddiness and the mid range is clear without sounding too thin. Overall, no one frequency is too overpowering and as long as you’re not pushing the system at the highest volumes, you won’t get any distortion.
Considering this is a portable speaker which has no wires, I would suspect that most people are buying this for the flexibility of carrying their music anywhere in the house, and potentially outside in the nice weather rather than sitting in front of a stationary system which might sound better. My wife and kids listened to the system for a week and really liked how easy it is to use and how well it sounded for their taste in music. If you are an audiophile, this system won’t sound like that $2500 component stereo you have in the bedroom / living room, but then again, I’m pretty sure iHome didn’t mean for you as the audience. For the majority of users, the iHome iW1 will be more than sufficient in sound quality and you’ll love it for its simplicity and portability.
