I'd have preferred an AC adaptor for charging, since there's already a huge tangle of wires on my desk, but the included USB cables do charge the units well. In my testing, a fully charged broadcaster played music for one minute short of five hours, which does nearly fit the stated five to seven hours battery life. The listener was nowhere near discharged in the same amount of time. Unfortunately, the broadcaster cannot broadcast while being charged.

Adjusting the volume on a broadcasting unit has no effect, not even if you've plugged headphones into the top. The broadcaster, in fact, can be used with its power turned off if you want to just listen to whatever source it's using.

When you adjust the volume on a listener unit, there is a beep each time you make an adjustment. This beep is louder than the music, even at low volumes, and can be quite piercing at higher volumes.

Overall
My main problem with this system is when I would use it. If I'm going to have an i2i Stream unit around my neck, I might as well have my iPod. True, it is ideal for sharing music, but I rarely have need for that. When my test system arrived I wasn't aware of its retail price. It's clearly targeted to teenagers, and I expected it to cost in the range of $30-$40. It is in fact over one hundred dollars, which is high for how often I would use it.

Of course, it's not all about me, and the i2i Stream is solidly designed and does exactly what it promises. If you want your children to share a single MP3 player, or listen via headphones to DVDs in the car, this would be a solution. Ditto if you watch a lot of television at night and don't want to disturb your sleeping partner, or if you want to listen wirelessly to a large stereo system.

Price aside, I rate the i2i Stream a solid four.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

James Booth is Editor-at-Large at ZATZ Publishing. In addition to writing for Computing Unplugged and Connected Photographer, he's the author of Do-It-Yourself Wedding Photography. A self-taught photographer, James also dabbles in digital graphics and has learned to be a PC and handheld specialist through personal trial and error. James can be reached at jbooth@zatz.com.