review: Griffin iTrip DualConnect FM and AUX-in charger for iPhone and iPod
November 28, 2010 by Bill Palmer · Leave a Comment
by Bill Palmer
Griffin’s iTrip, which allows an iPod’s music to be broadcast to a car’s FM radio, is nearly as old as the iPod itself. But FM transmission is not always the answer, particularly if you live in an urban or even suburban area, and more recently cars have begun to come with line-in ports for connecting iPods and iPhones with a much greater degree of audio quality. Accordingly, Griffin launched the AutoPilot, a line-in product with a built-in charger along with playback controls on the charging head. But with the new iTrip DualConnect, Griffin is dipping its chocolate into the proverbial peanut butter to see if these two disparate products are meant to go together. And the results are, to say the least, intriguing.
The obvious first question is why you’d want an FM transmitter at all if your car has a line-in port. But setting that aside for the moment, the DualConnect is a nice solid product in terms of what it offers. Its charging head controls are a sleeker design than was the case with the AutoPilot, replacing the hard plastic buttons with a nice satiny feel. And interestingly enough, you could actually use the DualConnect with your own cassette adapter if you want, thanks to the fact that the included line-in cable is detachable instead of built-in.
As far as the FM transmitter aspect of the DualConnect, it’s a mixed verdict. iPhone and iPod touch users will love the fact that fine-tuning the FM radio station you’re going to broadcast on is now done through a well-designed App Store app, whereas years ago this process was done with a manual knob, as odd as that sounds here in 2010. But even with the long time popularity of the iTrip, Griffin’s FM signal strength has only ever been merely okay, with competitors like Monster, Belkin, and Kensington having offered FM transmitters with a stronger signal at various times over the years, and that trend continues with the DualConnect. To be clear, the audio itself sounds fine. But using an FM transmitter is a battle to find a completely dead-silent station on your local FM dial, and residents of the big city and the suburbs know there’s no such thing in their neck of the woods. It’s why FM transmitters in general are only recommendable if you can’t use either a line-in or a cassette adapter, unless you live in a town of four hundred people where there only a few FM radio stations on the dial to begin with.
So far the DualConnect scores for a nice hardware design, a great FM transmitter interface, but only an okay FM transmitter signal strength. That brings us back to the question of just whom this product is for. The most obvious candidate is a family with more than one car, only one of which has line-in functionality, and the family wants to be able to move the DualConnect back and forth between vehicles. Another option is a traveler who frequently rents cars and doesn’t know what they’re in for. In fact when I know I’ll be renting a car on a trip, I travel with an FM transmitter just in case it ends up being my only option.
All that said, the audience for the iTrip DualConnect doesn’t feel particularly large. It’s one of those products which by virtue of being so versatile and theoretically usable by so many people, it oxymoronically limits its practical audience to only those people who need all of its features. And for that particular niche of people, it’s worth its $59 price tag. But don’t buy this product if you don’t plan to use both its FM transmitter functionality and its line-in functionality at one point or another.
rating: four stars out of five • price: $59 • GriffinTechnology.com
review: Griffin AutoPilot for iPhone and iPod
September 16, 2010 by Bill Palmer · Leave a Comment
Most “premium” car chargers for iPhone and iPod are defined merely by the fact that they have a more sophisticated look than their generic ten or twenty dollar counterparts. But Griffin Technology’s AutoPilot is a premium car charger in a very real sense: not only does it offer aux-in (generally the highest quality car audio attainable from your iPhone or iPod) for those users whose car stereos support it, it also includes basic playback buttons right on the head of the charger itself. This saves you the trouble of navigating to your iPhone’s on-screen play/pause button, for instance, which isn’t always the easiest thing to do while driving. That is, of course, if your car’s charging port is in a location you can actually reach while driving (which is not always a given).
The catch, though, is that this has been done before, and been done on the whole a little better. Monster’s same-priced iCarCharger 1000 is essentially the same product, but with an adjustable-angle charging head, aux-in cable which cleverly winds up inside the charging head to suit your needed length. However, the AutoPilot does have two distinct advantages over the iCarCharger, either or both of which may or may not be of value to you. The first is that the AutoPilot has a gain switch, meaning that you can adjust amount of audio feeding into your stereo, which can help if you’re getting too much or too little by default (different story with every brand of car). The other is that, because the included aux-in cable isn’t permanently attached, users whose stereos don’t have an aux-in port can instead use their own cassette adapter in conjunction with the AutoPilot.
Bottom line? The Griffin AutoPilot is nice product, worth its price tag in a vacuum. But it gets a less than stellar star rating because the competition offers a similar-yet-better product for the same price. However, the AutoPilot does offer some features which nonetheless make it the most recommendable option for some users.
One detail that does make the AutoPilot more compelling, for iPod users at least, is the fact that Griffin is currently offering an iPod-only version of the AutoPilot at a $15 dollar discount.
review by Bill Palmer
rating: 3.5 stars out of 5 • GriffinTechnology.com
Griffin AutoPilot for iPhone and iPod: first look
August 31, 2010 by Bill Palmer · Leave a Comment
The search for the perfect car connection product for iPhone and iPod continues, and Griffin’s latest entry comes in the form of a car charger along with a line cable designed for those users with stereos that have an aux-in port. The new wrinkle comes in the form of playback controls built into the front face of the charging unit itself, including play/pause and previous/next track.
There’s already a vaguely similar product on the market from Monster, so the two will have to be placed head to head in order to see which works best and for whom. A few immediately noticeable differentiators are the fact that Griffin’s AutoPilot has a high-low gain switch for the line-out port, aimed at helping to account for the different built-in line settings of various car stereos, along with the fact that the line cable is fully detachable from the charging unit. The latter means that users who don’t have a line-in port on their stereo could instead potentially use their cassette adapter instead, but that’ll have to be tested.
Fifty bucks is no small amount of money for a car charger, so this one will have to shine in hands-on testing.
Learn more at GriffinTechnology.com
Best of Show CES: motorMOUTH
January 8, 2010 by Bill Palmer · Leave a Comment
Editor’s note: iProng Magazine has been on-site at CES 2010 in Las Vegas all week reporting on newly introduced products for iPhone and iPod. This is just one of our “Best of Show” winners…
Working around hands-free laws can involve everything from a bluetooth earpiece to a visor mount speakerphone, but Scosche has taken things in a different direction with the motorMOUTH, a bluetooth microphone that plugs into your car’s line-in port and pairs up wirelessly with your iPhone to allow you to talk normally while driving and hear the other end of the conversation coming out your car’s speakers.
While products such as this one require two-way hands-on testing to determine overall call quality, which we were not able to perform on site, the brilliant simplicity of the product is what places it among the winners. CES 2010 was not a strong showing for iPhone/iPod car integration overall, but the motorMOUTH provided a glimmer of hope.
Read about all of iProng’s “Best of Show at CES 2010″ winners and finalists in the January 14th issue of iProng Magazine, which will feature a cover story interview with The Flaming Lips and more.
Review: Monster iCarCharger 1000
July 27, 2009 by Beatweek · 11 Comments
Featureless iPhone and iPod car chargers are a dime a dozen, and even those users with a line-in/aux-in port on their car stereo who are looking for a car charger with a built in line-out cable have plenty of options to choose from. But Monster’s new iCarCharger 1000 stands out from the pack with two distinct additional features.
The less immediately apparent (but probably more widely useful) of the two is that the line-out cable, which deceptively appears to be very short in the photo above, is actually wrapped around a spool inside the head of the charger. Slide the head open, unravel precisely how much cable you need for your car setup, lock it into place, and you won’t have one inch more cable running from your charger to your stereo than necessary. In a word, it’s a brilliant concept – and it works as advertised.
The second feature is flashier but may or may not be of practical value to you. The front of the charger includes basic playback features that allow you to play or pause the music and jump to not only the next or previous song, but also the next or previous playlist. This can come in super handy if your car setup is such that your iPhone or iPod isn’t easily available to you while driving (or if you find trying to operate it via the screen while driving to be a distraction).
The problem, though, is that far too many cars have their charging port in a position too far away from the driver for the buttons to be easily reached. In my own car I could barely reach it with my fingertips, and I’ve owned other cars in which the buttons would have been completely unreachable. The fact that the head of the charger can be rotated upward or downward can help, but the usability of the buttons is a crapshoot based on your particular car layout. So while the whole product is brilliant, the fact that too few users will actually be able to comfortably reach the buttons prevents me from being able to give the iCarCharger 1000 five stars, depending on your car it might be a perfect product for you.
Learn more at MonsterCable.com
review by Bill Palmer
