Music in my ears
Well actually Podcasts to my car stereo. Introducing the new toy, My Griffin iTrip for iPod nano
So my initial thoughts raise a couple of issues, the first and by far the biggest issue is the length of the headphone jack plug. It seems like its a few millimetres short, coz it only takes a small amount of movement for the iPod to come undocked from the jack thus stopping all sound. I’d have expected that you would be able to push the iPod right on, and it have some sort of lock (on the dock connector) like the standard nano cable does.
So if the iTrip/nano slide around when driving there is a good chance that the iPod will shift in the holdings and disconnect from the jack.
I did find that the stickie thing on the top helped a big (u can see from the images that I hadn’t removed the sticky cover yet) but it still only takes a mill or 2 movement to disconnect the sound.
The ability to configure the frequency on the screen rocks!! Simple jog type dial on the right of the unit access a menu on the iTrip that displays its info on the nano’s screen.. Nice.
My other small issue is in relation to power.. They state that you should only have the iPod at about 75% power so as to not distort the sound. If I do that I have to have the stereo turned up SOOOOO loud that if the iPod was to go off, I'd blow the speakers in the car with the static.
In all it works well, and I can’t expect to much power from a unit so small, otherwise i assume we’d get 5 mins of battery life.
Oh, actually there is another thing.. The iTrip is designed to become part of the nano, so I think a couple of changes to the design would work. Put back the nano connector on the bottom, so that syncing and powering can be done with the iTrip connected, and another minor addon would be to have a headphone jack in it so that you could keep it attached and still have headphone use.
Basically if a headphone was plugged in, the FM transmitter would shut down and act as a pass through for the audio.
Only had it a day or so, but so far so good.. If there are any changes to my thoughts I'll post an update.
