Review: Altec Lansing T612 Digital Speaker System for iPhone and iPod

When the portable inMotion speaker designers at Altec Lansing released the non-portable M602 Digital iPod Speaker System a year and a half ago, the appeal was obvious: as a combination of metal-grilled speakers and an iPod dock, M602 offered an audio experience close to the popular, similar Bose SoundDock at two-thirds the price, with added versatility in the form of bass and treble adjustments, video-out, line-in, and USB sync features, as well as…

Review: Polk I-Sonic ES2 iPod speaker system

If you've ever wanted to buy a song you heard on the radio, Polk's I-Sonic ES2, when combined with a recent iPod, makes doing so easy thanks to iTunes Tagging.

Article: iDesign: The Iconic Portable Speakers of Altec Lansing

Only two companies can reasonably claim to have defined the iPod speaker accessory category. One year before Bose came along with the $300 SoundDock—a comparatively expensive, visually neutral all-in-one speaker system that has sold millions of units—Altec Lansing debuted inMotion, a $150 fold-up speaker that perfectly matched the earliest docking iPod in both looks and spirit. inMotion was a sensation, adding four battery-powered 1-inch…

Article: iDesign: The Art of JBL’s iPod Speakers

Gather tiny speakers. Place them inside a plastic box. Put an dock on it and make it shiny. Then quadruple whatever the parts are worth and try to sell it. This recipe for iPod speaker creation—attempted by hundreds of cooks over the past six years—is, in one word, stale. But before it became so passe, it was polished to near-perfection by two companies that defined the iPod speaker market for an entire generation of customers and cloners.…

Article: iDesign on Griffin Technology’s Ingenuity: The Interview

Over the five editions of iDesign we have published, the concept—identify great design—has remained constant, while the focus has varied: some editions have looked at designs that were bold and beautiful, while others were simple and elegant, and still others were creative and brainy. As the subject of our fifth edition, Griffin Technology’s portable iPod and iPhone accessories are clearly the “brainy” ones of the bunch,…

Review: Griffin PowerBlock for iPod and iPhone (2008)

For the last few years, Griffin Technology’s car and home iPod chargers have been some of the most popular accessories on the market; thanks to more favorable pricing, its PowerBlock series of home chargers have sometimes surpassed even Apple’s own USB chargers in sales. This year, Griffin has overhauled its entire lineup of car and home chargers, including two-charger combination packs, resulting in an array of options that may be a little…