If you are one of those people, you will love the Griffin Radio SHARK.  As a connoisseur of good design, I found the radio SHARK’s white fin-shaped look very pleasing. The SHARK has three curved translucent areas that shine bright blue when the device is ready. The color changes to cherry red when the SHARK is recording.

Install the included software, plug the SHARK into a USB port on your computer, click on the radio SHARK icon, and you are ready to go. An attractive digital-looking radio appears on your computer screen. Click the radio’s buttons to change the band between AM and FM. There is a seek button, station presets, and volume controls.

The radio SHARK plays through your computer speakers or computer headphones. So the quality will be as good as the quality of AM or FM radio and your computer audio equipment. The radio SHARK is like a TIVO for radio. Just press a button and you can record any radio show that you can receive in your area. Click on Schedule and you can set the SHARK to record any segment of radio programming up to two hours long. You can also schedule recurring programs. Have it record Coast to Coast AM every evening or Car Talk every Sunday.

The fascinating part of this device is its included “time-shift recording.” When you are listening to a radio show, it silently records in the background. So if the door bell rings you simply press pause. When you get back to the computer, press play and you will be able to listen right where you left off.

On a PC you get to specify the format you want to record in: Good (WMA 64kbps) Better (WMA 96 kbps, Best, or Best (WMA 128 kbps).Radio SHARK works with both PCs and Macs. You can also record in uncompressed WAV format or, if you know are an audio aficionado you can set your own format. On a Mac the SHARK records in either AAC or AIFF formats. You can also transfer your recordings directly to your iTunes program and to an iPod.

When I first saw the radio on screen I lamented that I could barely see the tiny buttons. I later found a great feature. You can enlarge the size of the entire virtual radio in the Preference menu. You can also change it’s on-screen colors.  That certainly helped, but I still longed for larger buttons.

While this “cool” device is very useful, I would like to see a few improvements.

Since there is no programming grid to choose programs from, you have to know what you want to listen to and know the time and station that it is on. While this will be easy for well-liked programming, I would probably use this device even more if I could see a listing of programs as you can with television digital recorders like TiIVO or the Microsoft Media Center. One other slight problem, while the included manual was clear, it often referred to items in the Preference menu without telling you how to access the Preference menu. (Find it by right-clicking on the top bar of the radio.) I would also like to see a stronger built-in antenna. This won’t be necessary in big cities, but in rural areas, like mine I could only pull in the strongest signals.

The interface also needs a little fine-tuning, for instance when choosing a recording, the entire line should be clickable rather than just the event area. When I first tried it I didn’t give the event a name and found that I had to click on the blank area of the event column to playback the recording.

The SHARK is a useful tool. Griffin got the design, idea, functionality, and all the big things right. The SHARK is already a useful tool, but with just a little tweaking it could be great!

Manufacturer:  Griffin Technology

Price:  $69.99