The Abbee itself is shown in Figure 4. It is a square black and silver device that is 9.6 x 5.8 x 5.1 inches (244 x 129 x 147 mm) and weighs 4.1 lbs (1.9 kg).

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Figure 4: The Abbee

The Abbee is built to be simple and easy to use. It is, however, a very unique device, and this leads to a lot of questions about how it works. I guess that the folks at Myine anticipated this because when plugging the Abbee in for the first time, it talks to you. “Hi, I’m Abbee,” it says in a lilting female voice. Abbee then goes on to describe what the device is and what it does. Unfortunately, even after listening to Abbee, we were still left with many questions about Abbee. The first was how to get the Abbee girl to stop talking. We found in the Quick Start Guide that we needed to press the Tune button to exit the introduction. You’d think Abbee would have told us that!

Actually, the set up was very easy. You just insert the Music Lock into the top of the Abbee, connect the power adapter and the FM antenna, and turn on the Abbee. Figure 5 shows the back of the Abbee where you can see (from left to right) the Antenna jack, RCA out, the DC plug, the Aux In, and a headphone jack. The RCA out can be used to add more speakers. The Aux In port can be used to hook up a CD player.

Next to the headphone jack is a mini-USB port that is marked ”Update.” You might think that this would be used to attach to a computer for an update, but the User Guide clearly states that this port is “Not used. Do not connect to a computer. We use this connector at the factory to set up the initial product firmware.” We found this a little weird, but not really problematic for the end user.

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Figure 5: The back of the Abbee

All of the ports on the back of the Abbee are clearly marked. Above the ports you will also find the clearly marked On/Off Power button.

Once you have everything hooked up and turned on, you simply press the Mode button until the word “Live” appears in the display. The Abbee has an FM tuner built-in, so you can then use the Tune knob to set the Abbee to your favorite FM station. The Mode button and the Tune knob are both shown in Figure 4. In that Figure, you can also see a Favorite button that is marked with a star, five preset buttons that can be used to program your favorite FM stations, and a record button.