As the Earth's population gets more and more obsessed with making friends with trees, being nicer to clouds and refraining from weeing in rivers, the consumer electronics industry has been making some shrub-friendly innovations. So many in fact, our good friends at SmartPlanet have built an entire Web site dedicated to talking about such objects of dreadlockian desire.

One of our favourite hippy-friendly devices is the Baylis Eco Media Player -- an MP3 player that's powered with pure-grade elbow grease. But Roberts Radio knows something more powerful than the human arm: a little thing called the Sun.

If the Digital Radio Working Group has its way we'll all need to chuck out our lovely FM receivers and invest in DAB equipment before too long. Good news, then, for PURE Digital, a DAB favourite of ours. And it's just released its new One Mini -- an affordable and portable version of the popular PURE One.

It's a little monaural speaker-equipped radio that'll go for about £40, and with an optional battery pack will serve as a decent companion to any sun-drenched UK picnics, festivals or glue sniffing you've got planned for yourselves and the kids.

For those of you who can't stretch to the gorgeous Denon CX3 system, a much more affordable entry into the Denon world is coming your way towards the end of June. It's the D-M37DAB, and as you may have guessed from the title, it's got an integrated DAB radio receiver. Brill.

It's a contemporary design, sporting the sleek brushed silver look we've come to expect from even more expensive hi-fi separates, and comes with or without a pair of Denon SC-M37 speakers.

The iPod's lack of radio functionality is a frequent source of complaint, so Intempo has created the iDAB -- an accessory that clips into the the docking port of the iPod, giving you digital radio wherever you have your iPod classic, touch, nano or iPhone.

In theory, this sounds great. The problem -- well, there's a list of problems, actually -- is that this thing doesn't work at all like you'd expect. You would imagine it would use the iPod's display, its headphone socket, its navigational buttons. You wish. The iDAB basically just uses the iPod as one giant battery. You even have to have the iPod playing music to itself just to keep the iDAB functioning.

PURE Digital gets a fair wallop of love when it comes to the DAB world, but we're changing feet today and having a look at a snazzy little offering from Roberts. It's the Gemini 31 -- aka the RD31 -- and while it's generally a fairly standard DAB/FM radio, it's got a hella useful 'PausePlus' feature that lets you pause and rewind live radio for up to 40 minutes at a time.

It's essentially the same deal as PURE's ReVu technology, which uses built-in memory to record 40 minutes of audio as you listen live. If you want to rewind, you simply backtrack what's been captured as the system continues to record the broadcast, meaning you can easily fast forward and resume live listening.

British commercial radio company GCap Media has decided to axe two DAB stations -- theJazz and Planet Rock -- despite almost a million listeners, claiming that DAB was "not economically viable."

Together, the two axed stations had 927,000 listeners, but FM's retention of followers, combined with the growing popularity of Internet radio simulcasts, has hindered DAB's growth.

Last September, the British trade body DRDB -- Digital Radio Development Bureau -- forecast (.pdf) household DAB penetration to hit 40 per cent by 2009, and almost 60 per cent by 2011. Perhaps with the continuing rise of Internet radio and the increasing uptake of broadband in the UK, these figures could be significantly lower than anticipated.

We're living in happy times right now. Happy, because the Internet is no longer restricted to devices with wires. Yes, in 2008 the wireless Web is maturing like the finest cheese or the the tastiest wine. Ready to exploit the growing ubiquity of a Web without wires is Intempo, whose portable Wi-Fi radio is designed to be used on the move, obviously with the intention of being used near Wi-Fi hotspots. All very well in big US cities, but is it too early for the UK?

You'll be able to use the new radio -- codenamed 'Daisy' -- with about 6,000 Internet radio stations, or with Real or Windows Media audio streams. But you'll have to connect to a hotspot first. Despite its growing popularity, Wi-Fi isn't commonly available out on the streets here in Britain, potentially posing a problem.

So you're thinking about Christmas gifts? Perhaps on one hand you're considering a new DAB radio. On the other, you might be considering an iPod speaker system. It's time you put those hands together. Intempo's snazzy RDi iPod docking system is both a digital radio and a set of speakers for your iPod.

This sort of convergence makes sense, especially since the iPod is natively sans-radio even this many years into its life. The RDi dock has a price tag of £129, so it's only slightly more costly than DAB experts PURE Digital's promising Chronos iDock system -- a £99 setup that offers near identical functionality, and which we'll be getting our hands on soon.