The black Brick is aptly named—it’s a dense block weighing four pounds and measuring 9.6 inches wide, 3 inches tall, and 6 inches deep at its deepest point. Though the Brick’s not perfectly brick-shaped, its footprint is small. It sits on four rubber feet, though two of those feet fell off review unit shortly after I removed the Brick from its box.
The top of the Brick displays a large “The Brick” logo and hosts a dock cradle, using , for iPods and iPhones. Included is a cradle adapter for use with the iPod nano (all versions, according to Aluratek). Docking and removing my iPhone was painless.
The front of the Brick sports a small, blue-backlit LCD clock. The backlighting shuts off after a minute, but touching any button on the unit or its remote illuminates the display again. Directly below the clock face are four very tiny and identically shaped, round buttons: Volume Up, Volume Down, Source, and Standby. That last button functions as a power button, though there’s also a hardware power switch on the back of the system that shuts off the entire unit—including the time display.
Also on the back, directly underneath that power switch, is the port for the Brick’s included AC adapter. On the opposite side of the back are three ports: an 1/8-inch (3.5mm) stereo line-in jack for connecting an alternate audio source, a 1/8-inch (3.5mm) video-output jack for watching iPod- or iPhone-hosted video on a TV, and an FM-antenna port for connecting the included antenna wire. Each of these three jacks is covered with a small rubber cover that didn’t strike me as being very sturdy—I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more eventually came loose.
The included infrared remote sports a grid of buttons, including Volume Up, Volume Down, Mute Play/Pause, Back, and Forward, along with iPod/iPhone menu-navigation controls. A Source button (which mirrors the Source button on the front of the Brick) lets you cycle through the three possible sources: FM radio, the iPod/iPhone dock, and the auxiliary input. Finally, there’s a quartet of buttons devoted to setting the clock, setting the alarm, snoozing, and changing the alarm tone. Yes, this means that if you lose the remote, you can never set the clock or use the alarm again.