The Bottom Line: Good mounting and decent FM transmission, but annoying noises from the holder itself.
cjhuitt's Full Review: Dr. Bott (0142-IPCK) Case, Cable, Car Kit, Connect...
For about $20 less, this would be a great solution for listening to music in your car.
I don't have a cassette player in my car, and I didn't want to dink around with ins and outs to the back of the radio, so until someone produces a radio with an iPod-loading slot built-in, an FM-transmitter is the way to go.
First of all, the good spots. The all-in-one solution to this really appealed to me. The other options for FM-transmitters all needed battery power, either drawing directly from the iPod (but then I couldn't charge it at the same time), or their own battery packs (and endlessly-changing them). This unit uses the power from the cigarette lighter to both recharge the iPod and power the FM transmitter, so good news there. So far, I have had no problems with power, and indeed my iPod recharges as I go.
Additionally, the mount for this unit is done pretty well. The iPod slides up into a slot with connections for the headphones-out jack and the Firewire port. As the other reviewers have noted, the Firewire connecter moves around slightly to accomodate the different types of iPods. One small thing that I've noticed is that I had to raise the iPod slightly above the bottom of the slot to fit it properly with the slots.
As other reviewers have noted, the mounting systems only move vertically, not horizontally. It would be nice to be able to tilt and other wise adjust the iPod holder itself, but for me this isn't a big deal, as the power adapter portion holds it in a perfectly find spot for my car.
The power adaptor itself holds seems to solidly plug in, and I've never felt that my iPod or the unit was anything but well-held.
The radio transmitter hasn't given me any reception problems, although I've read about problems in some reviews. This might be because my antenna is nearly directly above the unit on my car, or for some other unknown reason. I will note, however, that when the unit isn't broadcasting, I get another station on the setting, reasonably clearly, so I don't believe it's lack of interference from other stations that is giving me reasonably good sound.
A note about sound quality: I couldn't really tell the difference between the songs coming from my iPod, and the regular radio songs. My car can be a bit noisy while driving, and it isn't the worlds best radio, so I'm not expecting symphonic quality. However, it didn't sound any worse than radio, so I was satisfied in this regard.
Now, the drawbacks.
The smaller annoyance is having to adjust the fine-tuner every time I get in the car. I'm not sure whether the jostling from loading the iPod is causing it to move, or whether it is a bit of shoddy electronics, but I plan on doing some experiments with scotch tame sometime soon. Once I have it set, I haven't had any problems along a 15 minute commute.
The much, much larger annoyance is what sounds like a loose spring banging away inside the case. At almost any time while doing regular driving, there will be a sudden noise like a semi-taught spring hitting plastic, and vibrating itself back into place. This is very noticable, quite common, and very, very annoying.
This, and a little extra give around some moving parts, makes me question how well the device is put together overall. I don't get a high degree of confidence about how the unit would survive being dropped, for instance, while my iPod has survived such an occurence wonderfully.
For what it's worth, it looks like it will be very easy to open up the case, and try to investigate where the springy noise is coming from. I plan on doing this sometime, probably over the weekend.
Since I'll be going on a long car trip soon, I thought I'd get this and hopefully pass the hours more easily. If I can get the spring noise reduced, it will help immensely. If the unit had been $20 cheaper, I wouldn't have even minded having to work around the springy-noise issue. At it's current price, however, it leaves something to be desired.
UPDATE:
I took the holder apart, and it was really fairly easy to find the spring and wrap some tissue around it. I believe that the spring is the main antenna for the unit, so don't do any wrapping with anythng metallic. After this, the springy noises are all gone, and all that is left is a little bit of vibration noise from the unit shaking while plugged into the cigarette lighter.
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