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

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.