review by Bill Palmer

Back at Macworld Expo in January of 2008, while being given a tour of the XtremeMac booth, I spotted a super-slim iPod/iPhone alarm clock called the Luna Voyager. Excited by the prospects I asked for a demo but was told that it wasn’t a finished functioning unit. Fast forward twenty-one months, so long a span of time that XtremeMac has since become part of Imation, and the fully functioning Luna Voyager has finally arrived. And it’s even tinier than I remembered.



Which is a good thing, of course, as traveling with something like an iPod alarm clock can be a pain if it’s too large, particularly with luggage restrictions of late. Minimalistic in every sense, the Voyager only has two tiny visible buttons and a wheel, with recessed speaker grilles on each side. Not much more than an inch tall, the product looks vaguely like an external hard drive laid on its side, both in terms of size and styling. But plug it in (or pop in batteries) and the front lights up with the time of day in bright blue. Drop your iPhone or iPod into the centered dock on the top, set the alarm with a few buttons (the Voyager can automatically set the time of day by getting it from your iPhone or iPod), and you’re off to the races. You can even make a “Luna” playlist in iTunes and wake to that instead of the most recent song played.



Any iPod/iPhone alarm clock is going to necessarily draw comparisons to iHome’s leading line of similar products, and in this case I was expecting the Luna Voyager to square off directly with iHome’s similarly portable iP27 product. However, putting the two next to each other, the iP27 suddenly looks monster-sized – something of a revelation considering how many thousands of miles I’ve traveled with the iP27, and never thought of it as being oversized until now. Actually come to think of it, iHome’s earlier iH26 was smaller than the current model, but the Luna Voyager is significantly smaller than even the iH26.



With that revelation, my expectations for audio quality changed altogether. And as it turned out, my revised expectations proved to be correct. The Luna Voyager sounds merely okay. Impressive audio for its size, actually, but it’s immediately apparent how they managed to get it so small in the first place. I wouldn’t mind waking up to it every day, but the compromise comes when you consider using it for music playback during the rest of the day when you’re fully awake. Whereas the iP27 sounds (just barely) good enough to be used as an all-day speaker system while on the road, the Luna Voyager just doesn’t cut it in that department.



None of which is to distract from its appeal when it comes to its strictly intended use, which is to allow you to wake up to your own music. In my tests I found that the two buttons didn’t suffer in their ease of use due to their tininess, and the alarm fades in with a gradual volume increase, as I’d hoped it would. And the Luna Voyager manages to accomplish with two buttons and a wheel (plus two switches on the back) what it took iHome nine different buttons to pull off on the iP27. Still, I can tell you from experience that traveling with a product like this usually means that you’ll be in a hotel and looking to use it as a daytime playback device at one point in your trip or another. And the Luna Voyager doesn’t sound that much better than the middling speakers built into my laptop.



When it comes to the value proposition, the $79 Luna Voyager comes with basically nothing, whereas the $99 iP27 comes with a remote control and velcro carrying case. Pick up the Luna Voyager for its current $62 price on Amazon.com and it becomes a much better value, but the bottom line is that the product’s lone significant feature is that it’s slim and light and therefore very easy to fit into your suitcase.



I’m just not sure how many users would want to bother lugging along an iPhone alarm clock, even one this tiny, if they’re only going to get this kind of audio quality when they get there; it just has the feeling of “niche product” written all over it. That having been said, this product does one thing and does it really well, and I actually look forward to traveling with it on trips where I need to pack light or when I know I’m not going to have any idle time back at the hotel to use it for daytime music playback anyway.



I suppose I’m personally disappointed with the results because I’ve had high expectations for it the past two years, and it’s turned out to be merely mortal after all. But you’ll probably eat it up if you’re a part of the niche that the Luna Voyager is squarely aimed at.

Learn more about the Luna Voyager at XtremeMac.com.

review by Bill Palmer

Sixteen hundred dollars. Yeah, you read that correctly. Can any iPhone accessory possibly be worth that kind of price tag? Parrot wants to find out, with this new product designed by famous French product designer Philippe Starck (although the product is named “Zimku” it’s more commonly referred to as “Parrot by Starck”), and more tangibly, it comes in the form of two standalone speaker towers that connect to each other wirelessly. Cone-shaped on bottom, each tower funnels up into a rectangular shape that’s only about five inches wide and one inch deep, with an iPhone/iPod dock on the top of one tower and playback controls on top of the other.



If you’re going to spend the kind of money on an iPod/iPhone stereo system that could instead be used to buy an iPhone and an iPod touch plus all nine colors of iPod nano and still have money left over, then it had better offer a mind blowing experience. Not great. Not excellent. Mind blowing. Nothing less. And after having spent quality time this week with the Parrot by Starck, set up in various positions around the house, I can report back that the experience did in fact blow my mind. Is it perfect? No, and I’ll get to that. Is it worth $1600? As always, that’ll be for each of you to decide after reading the review. But here are my experiences and conclusions.



The first litmus test with any wireless product is ease of setup, and in this case, after taking the two towers out of their rather large box and plugging each into an electrical outlet, I found that there was no wireless setup to even worry about. I placed my iPhone into the dock, hit the play button, and music came out of both speakers. Ideally, wireless products should be as easy to set up as wired ones, and while that’s not always the case with various products I’ve tested, it is with this one.

As far as range, I started with the towers ten feet apart from each other, then twenty, then thirty, then forty, all with success. It wasn’t until I placed them about fifty feet apart (with two walls in between them) that I started to get some flakiness from the second tower. It’s not that the audio quality ever did degrade, just that it started to cut out intermittently at that distance. So figure on being able to use these up to roughly fifty feet apart within the same room, a little less if you’re going to put them in different rooms. In any case you’re probably most likely to position them ten two twenty feet apart in the same room, but it’s nice to have the extra flexibility.



Having passed the setup and range tests, it was time to move on to testing what really matters, which is of course audio quality. The music that comes out of the Parrot by Starck is just plain beautiful. Amazing. Stunning. Pick a word, they’re all understatements. The clarity is exquisite. The higher ranges and lower ranges all sound fantastic.



But then you probably already guessed all of that, based just on the price tag. At this price point, and also at this size, the Parrot by Starck had better go beyond merely delivering beautiful rich music, which you can get from a product a fifth the size and a fifth the price. It needs to offer something substantially more. Sure, you can crank the Starck loud enough to literally wake the neighbors without any loss of audio quality (actually, at its top volume, I think the Starck could not only wake your neighbors but enrage them to the point where they come over to your house and murder you), but it’s not just about high-fidelity volume, either. Placing one tower on each side of my desk, both facing me, I felt so immersed in the music that it seemed to be a part of the room itself as opposed to coming from any particular direction – and that’s what you can’t get from even the best of the $300 desktop dockable systems. It’s quite a price premium, but the immersion does offer an entirely different kind of listening experience.



My only criticism of the Starck is with what you can’t do with it. The included remote impressively also works through walls, all too rare in this market, but lacks the ability to navigate the iPhone’s or iPod’s menus, a feature that’s increasingly commonplace on even $100 systems. And perhaps more importantly, you can’t adjust the Starck’s bass or treble ratio. Not that you’d necessarily want to, seeing how stunning it sounds out of the box. But again, this is a standard inclusion for many less-expensive competing products.



Obviously you have to be at a certain income or wealth level in order to afford the $1600 Parrot by Starck in the first place. But if you are, then consider yourself lucky, as the listening experience is nothing short of amazing. It can also be used as a computer speaker system.

Learn more about the Parrot by Starck at Parrot.

review by Bill Palmer

When Apple appends the word “classic” to the name of one of its products, it’s typically an intentional death knell: the gradual phase-out begins immediately, and there will be no significant upgrades to the product in the mean time. But apparently Altec Lansing has a different definition of the word, as the new “inMotion Classic” (also known as the iMT620) includes a number of revisions and enhancements despite having largely the same feature set on paper as its predecessor, the iM600.



Not that the two look anything like each other. Gone is the all-black, rounded corner design of the iM600 in favor of Altec Lansing’s current favored trapezoidal styling of black and silver with gold trim, with the clearly defined line giving the illusion that the Classic is smaller when it’s really about the same size as its predecessor (actually about an inch wider left to right). The biggest functional change is that the old flip-out dock has been replaced a recessed one, and the unit now stands upright thanks to a swing-out arm that acts as a stand (and can also be folded straight up and used as a carrying handle). Perhaps it’s this simplification that allowed room in the budget for other new features. The bundled remote control now includes the ability to navigate up and down your iPhone’s or iPod’s menus. And the LCD screen, which was kind of a waste on the iM600 because it only displayed the track info from FM radio and not from songs playing on your iPod, now rectifies that. It still misidentifies your iPhone as an “iPod” but that’s being picky.



Audio quality is marginally improved on the Classic. It wasn’t immediately noticeable when I put the Classic and iM600 side by side, but it became more apparent when I got to songs that were more bass-heavy. I wouldn’t suggest ditching your iM600 in favor of the Classic based on the slightly improved audio quality alone; it’s the other features that make this a significant upgrade.



In fact, perhaps surprisingly, the Classic pretty much wipes the floor with Logitech’s new competing S315i, which is twenty dollars cheaper but doesn’t come all that close on audio quality and doesn’t come with a remote, or offer a built-in radio or an LCD screen or a built-in handle. However, the Classic falls down significantly in comparison to the S315i in one area: battery life. Both products include a built-in rechargeable lithium battery. But while the S315i offers ten hours of battery life (twenty in “reduced audio quality” mode), the Classic offers a comparatively meager five hours – and that’s with the Classic being about twenty percent thicker front to back than the S315i. It’s not quite as head-scratching as Altec’s slightly larger MAX, which only offers 3.5 hours of battery life, but it’s still unfortunate that the Classic offers only half the battery life of its primary competitor, when it otherwise outpaces it in just about every way.



And that alone keeps the Classic from being a five star product, despite the fact that overall it’s the best portable iPod/iPhone system at the sub-$150 price point to ever hit the market.



There’s one other issue with the Classic which initially threw me off and eventually grew to feel like a very minor thing, but worth mentioning if for no other reason than future reference: the on-board control buttons, which were semi-randomly split between the top surface and the docking well of the old iM600, have been smartly all placed on the top of the Classic. However, they’ve been centered in such a way that the two buttons you’re likely to use most often during playback, volume up and volume down, are directly behind the docking well. With a shorter device like an iPod nano they’re still visible, but my iPhone stood tall enough to hide them, at least when I had the Classic sitting at eye level. And so the first few times I reached for the volume I absent-mindedly rammed my fingers into my iPhone. Within my first day with the unit I’d gotten very used to accessing them easily, and I’m a klutz to begin with. But the six topside buttons really should be split left and right of the dock on the next iteration of this product. Ultimately, however, I felt that this wasn’t something that should affect the product’s rating, particularly since the new button layout does make more sense than the previous iterations’ scattershot placement.



Consider the Logitech S315i if you place battery life above all else. But otherwise, Altec Lansing’s Classic is your winner for portable systems at this price point – by a long shot.

Learn more about the inMotion Classic at AltecLansing.com.

review by Bill Palmer

Dual-device chargers for iPhone and iPod have become increasingly commonplace over the past year. But until now, the idea of a dual dock on a stereo system had gone untried, presumably if for no other reason than the potential complication involved in using one set of playback controls to manage two devices. iHome’s new iP88 alarm clock, then, comes as a potential boon for those couples who each want to wake to their own music from their own device at different times of the morning, as well as for individual users who have an iPhone and an iPod and simply want to keep both of them fully charged and immediately playable.



This isn’t the first time iHome has offered a $149 “premium” version of their standard (and best on the market) $99 alarm clock, which in its current iteration is known as the iP9. Last year the company sent me the iP99, priced at $149, which sounded a little better, looked a bit sleeker, and squeezed in a few extra features, none of which justified the extra fifty dollars and ultimately left the iP99 which a lower comparative star rating than the cheaper iP9. But this time around, the iP88 is immediately identifiable as being a potentially fifty-dollar-superior product based on the dual dock, based on the dual dock alone, at least for those users who can put such a feature to good use.



I’ll say this about the styling of the iP88: it is what it is. What it looks like in the picture is what it looks like in real life. It’s boxier than the iP9 or iP99, and is in fact a perfect rectangular solid, with the exception of the front grille angling forward toward the center clock – and even it has defined lines. Some users will see the iP88’s squareness as a sign of refinement, while others will see it as just plain square. It strikes me as being more of an individual matter of preference than anything else. The brushed grey metal of the top and sides does match the look and feel of iTunes itself. Then again, there’s no black, blue, pink or purple option here as there is with the iP9.



But you’re going to buy the iP88 for the two docks, not for the styling, as the only option for couples up to this point would have been to buy a pair of iP9 units for a total of $198, as opposed to a single $149 iP88 unit. And what I found while testing out the iP88 with both an iPhone and and iPod nano docked simultaneously is that, for the most part, iHome has managed to pull it off without creating the kind of interface confusion that I thought would be automatic with a product like this. The remote is perhaps the more flawlessly implemented interface, as a pair of buttons near the top allow you to toggle between controlling Dock 1 or Dock 2, much like the buttons on a TV remote control allow you to toggle between your TV, VCR, and cable box. Fortunately, the iP88’s remote is nowhere near as impenetrable as the typical cable box remote, as the company has essentially only had to add one button in order to offer full control of both devices.



Surprisingly, the on-board playback controls are a bit more of a challenge. Left and right play/pause buttons appear to be each encircled in their own volume wheel. But as it turns out, the left wheel controls the volume of whichever device is currently playing, while the right wheel is for setting the alarm. This leads to the awkward scenario of hitting the play button for the unit that’s in Dock 2, then instinctively spinning the wheel surrounding that button in an attempt to adjust the volume, and only then remembering that the volume wheel is on the other side. Much as I tried, this is simply not something I could get used to while I was testing the unit.

That having been said, it’s a comparatively minor complaint, particularly in comparison to what I might have feared going in. The dual alarms work exactly like one would hope, so the bit of confusion only really applies when you’re listening to your music later in the day and two devices happen to be docked simultaneously. In that sense, it’s more of a concern for an individual user who routinely keeps two devices docked (for instance, a stuffed-to-the-gills iPhone along with an iPod classic that holds the rest of the user’s music library) and wants to be able to play music from one or the other; couples are less likely to both have their device docked at the same time, unless it’s close to bedtime.



In all, the dual dock implementation on the iP88 is better than what I was even hoping for. Perhaps I was being too skeptical going in; then again, it’s not as if this has even been attempted up to this point, so it would seem that the industry has been as skeptical as I have. That having been said, now that iHome has shown that it can be done, and done very well (if not quite perfectly), perhaps others will now follow.



As to the iP88’s other premium features, the story here is similar to what it was with last year’s premium model, the iP99. The audio sounds perhaps twenty dollars better, to put it into buying terms. And the LCD can be more finely tuned, with eight dimmer settings instead of the usual three or four. You can set three different alarms (assignable to any combination of docked devices, radio, and/or buzzer). And the day and date display on the clock face. But the real difference here is that the iP88 actually offers a feature worth paying the fifty dollar price premium, in the form of the dual dock.



And of course the iP88 includes all of the features that make the standard $99 iP9 such a great product in the first place, including the gradual wake, the full iPhone/iPod menu control built into the remote, the built-in AM/FM radio, the ability to set the alarm differently for the weekend, the EQ and spatializer settings, and everything else that’s right about the iHome alarm clock line. The iP9 is still your best bet if you only plan to dock one device at a time, as the rest of the iP88’s features don’t add up to make the price premium worth it. But if you’re going to put the two docks to good use, particularly if you had otherwise been considering buying a pair of iP9’s, then the iP88 suddenly becomes the product you never knew you always wanted, and a great value.



I can’t give the iP88 five stars for the simple reason that the dual playback controls aren’t quite perfect and need one more round of refinement to reach the perfection that I expect iHome will achieve on their next attempt at a dual dock alarm. That having been said, if you’ve ever looked at an iPod/iPhone alarm clock and thought that it would be perfect for you if only it worked with two iPods and/or iPhones, then the iP88 is your winner.

Learn more about the iP88 at iHomeAudio.com.