Pure Move 2520 Personal Radio Review

Summary: A quality product that’s worth the higher price.

Buy it online: See price on Amazon.co.uk

The Pure Move 2520 is a stylish pocket DAB radio from established British digital radio brand Pure. This radio was released in 2016 as an update to the earlier Pure Move 2500, though there aren’t any immediately noticeable differences between the two radios.

The Move 2520 is more expensive than most personal digital radios. Is it worth the price? Find out in this review…

Features

Dimensions: 10.2 cm high x 5.6 cm wide x 1.5 cm deep
Weight: 105 g

Performance and use

The first thing you’ll notice about the Pure Move 2520 is that it’s very compact and has a sleek, stylish design. It’s truly pocket sized, so it’s convenient for using while walking around. The headphones function as an aerial, as it doesn’t have an extendable aerial.

Many pocket DAB radios come with earphones included, though they’re usually very cheap and poor quality. The earphones that come with the Move 2520 aren’t great, but they aren’t completely unusable either. One good thing about this radio is that you can adjust the bass and treble levels to get a better sound.

This radio is controlled using a rotary dial, which can be a bit fiddly and over-sensitive. The radio is generally easy to use though once you’ve got used to it.

Unlike many pocket DAB radios, the Pure Move 2520 has a sleep timer which you can use to program the radio to switch off after a set period of time. This is useful if you listen to the radio while drifting off to sleep, as mean you don’t run down the battery while you’re asleep.

You can also use this radio in the car by plugging one end of an aux-to-aux cable into the radio’s earphone socket and the other end into the car’s aux-in socket. This makes it a cheap and convenient alternative to replacing your old car radio with a new DAB radio.

This radio uses a bespoke rechargeable battery pack, the ChargePAK M1, which is charged via a micro USB cable (included). Pure state that the battery will last for up to 15 hours before needing to be recharged. However, in practice the battery is unlikely to last for more than 10 hours, which is quite typical for a pocket DAB radio.

Battery packs wear down eventually, so the battery life will deteriorate over time. However, it’s quite cheap and easy to buy a replacement ChargePAK M1 battery pack for this radio. This is in contrast to lots of other portable radios where it would be cheaper and easier just to buy a new radio.

Like all Pure products, the Move 2520 is available with a 3-year manufacturer’s warranty, which means you can feel confident buying it.

Verdict

The Pure Move 2520 is a quality product that’s worth the higher price. It’s well made and should last years of use, unlike cheaper pocket radios which can be very unreliable. This radio also tends to work well in the car using an aux cable, making it a versatile product.

Similar radios

Pure offer a few other pocket radios, the newest of which is the Pure Move R3, which was released in January 2018. Like the Move 2520, the Move R3 has an elegant design and a premium price tag. The two radios have very similar features, though the Move R3 feels a bit more modern with an OLED rather than an LCD screen.

A cheaper alternative is the Majority Petersfield-Go, which costs about half as much as the Pure Move 2520 at the time of writing. The Petersfield-Go is a compact pocket FM/DAB Radio which features a clasp for attaching it to your clothing. The Petersfield-Go works well but doesn’t have as many features as the Move 2520—it doesn’t let you adjust the bass and treble levels and there’s no sleep timer.

For some more options, see our roundup of the best pocket DAB radios.