All Portable audio Feeds

iTrip Auto SmartScan

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We're not going to beat around the bush: this update to Griffin's iTrip is the best in-car FM transmitter for iPods and iPhones that we know of. It blew us away with some excellent qualities.

The best feature is SmartScan, a one-button scanning feature that scans the airwaves and saves the three clearest results as preset channels.

This is a great time-saver; just press the preset option and take your pick from the three open signals.

Strong signal

A bright and friendly white-on-black LED display is on hand to help, and a very simple menu system controlled by three buttons is headache-free to operate.

Equally impressive is the signal strength, which was enough to strongly overlay Radio 1's 99.5FM signal. This means you won't have to flick channels to get a better reception.

The price is high, but the quality is undeniable. If you're in the market for kit to broadcast your iPod to your in-car radio, then look no further.

Solar Technology Free Loader

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Enough sunlight falls onto Britain in less than 45 minutes to supply the nation's energy needs for an entire year.

We're generations away from being able to tap into a significant part of that, so a little bit of free electricity always appeals.

The bad news sets in almost immediately. You can't charge devices directly - the solar panels can't deliver a charge fast enough, apparently - and so you first have to charge the Free Loader's internal battery, then dump that power to your device.

A struggle to charge

Next, charging times. You can charge it over USB - fast enough to be usable - but charging using the power of the sun takes much longer.

The manual says that a day in full sun is enough to charge the battery, but this triples when you keep it behind glass, whose UV filters cut down the potential energy, and you have to contend with cloudy days, too.

Unlike charging over USB, there's no way to know when the battery is charged. Three different LEDs light and change colour to inform you of charging status, but the system is rather clunky.

Use with your iPhone

A fully charged battery is able to supply a fair bit of power; it charged an iPhone halfway, giving 2 hours, 20 mins of talk time.

It includes charging adaptors for the iPod (up to 60GB), Nintendo DS Lite, LG Chocolate series, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson mobiles, the PSP, Tom Tom and digital cameras, and anything that charges over USB; extra connection tips are available.

After a full week of charging on a windowsill in early spring, it was only juiced up enough to provide 50 minutes of iPhone talk time. Remember, though, that the iPhone is a complex beast; a little entry-level Nokia would probably get more.

The Free Loader, then, is cheap enough for it to be a handy source of emergency power on your car's dashboard, but don't expect to sever your connection to the national grid.

Tsunami e-DATA 2500

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The hard disk in a MacBook is easy to replace, but what do you do with the old drive?

Rather than sell it on eBay or throw it away, you can buy a cheap enclosure and suddenly you've gained an extra portable drive.

This model from Tsunami looks sharp, and while the industrial design may not be to all tastes, the screws are easy to access.

They can get snagged and the controller board adds bulk, but it's handy if you need to swap disks around with any frequency. This makes installation a breeze, while two blue LEDs shine through the transparent case to display power and activity.

A versatile drive

Annoyingly, however, the e-DATA 2500 was a bit choosy about what USB cables it used.

Supplied with a double-headed cable, it was happy to bus-power with just one plug connected, but refused to mount with other cables.

It's cheap, easy to use and looks the part, though, so it gets our thumbs up.

Gear4 IceBox

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To protect iPhones, Apple decided to use glass screens instead of the usual iPod plastic, so scratch-resistant cases and sleeves such as this IceBox from Gear4 are a hard sell.

The IceBox wraps an iPhone in hard plastic but provides easy access to the controls and ports. There is nothing about the design that interferes with the iPhone controls; you can easily command the touchscreen through the plastic sheath.

A tight squeeze

One problem with the IceBox is the quality of the fit. It took a good few attempts and a bit of chin-scratching to make the case close properly around the iPhone. The lack of a gap between the sliding shoe and the iPhone body means a tight fit.

Even when properly aligned the case still doesn't sit quite flush, with one half of the design protruding a lip over the other. It's only one millimetre or so of raised plastic, but you can feel the edge.

The price is low, as with all Gear4 releases, but the quality isn't top-notch, which makes this a budget offering, at best.

Gear4 Airzone FM dock

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This FM transmitter is an update to Gear4's previous Airzone transmitter.

It's kept its low price and has done away with the need for an AAA battery, running instead on the iPod's power. Unfortunately a charging cable doesn't come in the box, but one is available as an optional extra.

Radio for your iPod

The signal strength and ease of tuning were both acceptable. You get four preset channels, down from six on its predecessor, but a better LED display.

Critically, the dial moves in increments of 0.1MHz so you can get a precise frequency. It will also broadcast a signal on any frequency from 87.6 to 107.9, which means you can avoid radio station chatter by tuning the signal below the UK's 88.1 FM radio spectrum starting point, if you car or home stereo allows.

You can also beam the iPod signal to your hi-fi, thereby turning the iPod into a remote.

Build quality could be improved but generally we liked it.

Griffin Evolve

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Evolve. That’s a good name for these speakers.

Gone are the speaker cables; instead, you get a base unit that beams music to the speaker boxes wirelessly.

Two three-inch aerials do the beaming. Thanks to this clever development, you can take these speakers (either one or both) into the kitchen with you, then pick a speaker up and carry it into the garden – anywhere, in fact, within 150 feet of the base unit.

Blare you iPod anywhere

It’s a very flexible way to spread music around your house, and the first time we’ve seen this technology properly executed. You dock your iPod in the base and use a remote to browse tracks.

The remote is very simple, and doesn’t have a screen, but worked well at basic browsing. Speaker signal reception didn’t appear to deteriorate the further we walked away from the base unit.

We walked over 120 feet from it and then stood behind a wall before we could just start to hear the signal breaking. That seemed reasonable. We didn’t notice any network chatter during the test.

Well built speakers

The speakers are magnetically shielded too, which protects them from network chatter. These speakers charge on a three-pronged metal tray. Each can take a ten-hour charge, and to save power they will automatically switch off if they don’t get any music in an hour.

There’s no way to discern whether the speakers are nearly empty or nearly full, but LEDs let you know when they are completely full (green) or completely empty (red). Either speaker can be the left or right channel.

You can also add extra speakers to the unit, which share the same network. The connections are generous. You get twin RCA ports for taking an audio signal into the back of the base station.

A further set of audio- out RCA jacks, including video- out, are there in case you want to tack the unit onto a home entertainment centre. There’s also S-Video out. Sadly, you don’t get a USB port for syncing with a Mac, nor a 3.5mm jack for taking a signal from an iPod shuffle.

Disappointing audio

On the downside, the sound quality was tinny. We put this down to the acrylic housing of the speakers and we suspect that if wood were used instead then a richer, deeper sound would have been produced.

On the remote is an EQ button, which goes some way to rounding out the sound. At £154, we suspect that most people will be happy with this product.

This is the first time a wireless speaker set has impressed us as a viable product, and the convenience is undeniable.

Gear4 WorldTour V2

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WorldTour is a box full of travel plugs bundled with a USB adaptor and two USB ports that will suck juice from sockets wherever you may roam.

You get four socket adaptors in the box covering the types you will need in the UK, Europe, US and Australia.

Cheap and competent

The set worked fine for us. You slot the adaptors in and out of the USB adaptor to provide a charging platform for up to two USB devices.

An iPod-charging cable comes in the box, in case you left yours on the beach, which is a nice bonus. The only problem that might be a deal-breaker is the amount of space the kit takes up in a bag, which is far more than one of those universal plug adaptors.

The price, as with all Gear4 gadgetry, is bargain basement, but it works as advertised and was happily charging an iPhone and iPod simultaneously during our test.

Philips GoGear SA6025

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An odd one, this. It's nearly full iPod-sized, despite being a mere 2-4GB.

A lot of folk will find it less appealing than other flash-based players, wanting something they can carry without noticing. It does mean the GoGear has a much bigger screen though, so watching video on it isn't the squint-induced agony of so many others.

Furthermore, it's a shame that the controls couldn't have been much bigger - there's a lot of wasted space on the player. One could argue that this gives it a pleasing minimalism, complemented by high build quality.

The tiny side-mounted volume controls just don't make any sense, though. The directional and playback controls, meanwhile, look like they're supposed to be a spinnable wheel, but turn out to just be standard click-buttons in a circle.

This is shameless iPod imitation - just ripping off the look, but not the actual functionality. The plagiarism is even more obvious in the menus, which have only minor cosmetic changes from the familiar Apple interface.

There's some weird lag, too: the player generally has a brief think after you press a button before it does anything. Firmware updates may sort this out, but for now it slows down browsing through a large music collection. Another minor irritation is needlessly placing the headphone socket on the side, rather than top or bottom, of the GoGear. This means that its in-pocket width increases by a centimetre or so.

Retro-chic

In better news, it doesn't try to force any nasty proprietary software on you. Windows Media Player is on its CD, so you won't end up with a PC full of junk.

Usefully, there's an application to check for firmware updates and fix database errors on it, and another by video experts Arcsoft to handle re-encode. This doesn't offer at lot of options, but it's pretty fast and reliable, and offers a high-quality picture. It's just a shame that it won't crop a widescreen movie into a full frame one.

Also standing out is a cheerfully over-the-top, 80s-style digital clock screensaver, which sees it strive for its own personality rather than Apple's and makes it look pretty cool if it's left on a table to its own devices. With a radio and a mic built-in, all for a cheaper price than other flash players, it ends up being good value. Its audio quality is perfectly acceptable and the 15-hour battery life is decent, even if the larger size of the GoGear surely means there's room for a more capacious power cell.

While it's by no means a failure, the GoGear does end up looking fairly ordinary next to its rivals. Its controls aren't great and, despite the benefits of the larger screen, it's just too large for a player of its capacity.

Good construction and few fun bells and whistles suggest that Philips can certainly make something pretty special of the GoGear range. This isn't it, although its low price means it's something to consider if every last penny matters. However, when just £10 more nets you the vastly superior iRiver X20, it's hard to make a strong argument for doing so.

Altec Lansing inMotion iM7

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When a piece of hardware is given a name containing the word 'motion', you tend to think it's able to be, you know, carried around a bit. To the beach perhaps. Or the park. And when you first pick it up, this scenario doesn't seem too outlandish.

Okay, so it's essentially a souped-up boom box, but it's certainly no bigger than a tape deck like those carried around New York streets in 1980s films. True, the carry handle isn't ideal; you'll need to get a firm grip to stop the boom box slipping off your hand. But, unfortunately, the inMotion has a far greater issue than that: power.

At home, you can use the mains. But out and about, juice is a little more difficult to obtain. Just ask Marty McFly. Mind you, that's why batteries were invented. And yes, the inMotion takes batteries. But the problem is it takes rather a lot of them. Eight to be precise.

Eight! And there's a further problem - they're D size! (That's the really, really big ones.) So T. Hmm. Suddenly portability seems a less attractive option. In fact, you'll probably need to drive your car to the park to drop it off before you can enjoy your picnic.

The sound isn't the best we've heard (see the i-deck on the next page), while the distortion from even a little too much bass is terrible. The remote was rather unresponsive, too. But credit is due for having a separate volume control rather than relying on the iPod's controls.

The iM7 works with bottomdock iPods and iPod minis (an adaptor for minis is included). The panel you slot your iPod into has a clever soft-eject mechanism. The iPod doesn't fit that snugly in the slot, though. And for the best part of £200, there are far better options for your money - it's not quite the finished article in our eyes. Dan Grabham

Altec Lansing iM7

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The iM7 instantly reminds us of a classic boom box design, except that in the place of a twin cassette deck you get a spring-loaded iPod-dock loading bay that smoothly flips out with a push and click. A wheel clamp then tightens the grip on the iPod, setting things firmly in place for travelling.

The 'iM' in the model name stands for inMotion, and true to form the speaker travels well. Two bays of 4D batteries access underneath the iPod tray mean you can take the iM7 out and about with ease. A rubber-lined handgrip helps things further.

A wireless remote parks into a slot around the back of the speaker above a generous rank of input and output audio ports.

Among these there's a 3.5mm audio input, an output for headphones, a remote with extra treble and bass controls, and both an S-Video and composite out port so you can play a video feed from a video iPod through a compatible TV with the sound pumping out of the iM7.

Boom

And it does pump. This would be a great unit for the party-minded, people who love a lusty bass.

The bass is pretty full-on, powered by a sideways poised 4-inch subwoofer which can actually be quite overpowering, even on bass-light acoustic melodies like Nick Drake's Time Has Told Me or Dylan's Maggie's Farm.

It lacks the tightness or detail of the Apple Hi-Fi or warmth of the SoundDock, but at nearly £100 less than either, it's still perfectly acceptable, and you can always turn the bass down using the remote.

Treble and bass controls are not an option on the other two, except through an iPod EQ setting.

With the bass minimised you get a pretty balanced output from the iM7, together with solidity and sounds that can travel. James Ellerbeck