iPod in the car

I’ve had my iPod for a month or two now, and I love the fact that I can listen to “radio shows” (also known as podcasts) whenever and whereever I want to. Almost immediately after I got the iPod I went out and bought a cassette adapter from Philips at Wal-mart for about $10. It works great (once I figured out that turning the volume way up on the iPod is much better than turning up the volume on the radio - the radio picks up the noise from the cassette adapter), but last week I was in two vehicles that didn’t have a cassette player. So I was SOL and PO’d…

I started looking at some FM radio tuner - since most cars still have a radio (but for how long…?). Two of them struck me as good products: the Griffin iFM and the DLO TransPod.

The iFM has besides the radio tuner two cool options: remote control and recording. The remote control looks pretty standard (play, pause, forward, volume, etc), but the recording has two options: record through a built-in microphone, or record the radio. Plus the little remote looks damn sleek. It sells for about $50.

The TransPod also has two cool options besides the tuner: it charges the iPod through one of your vehicle’s power adapters, and it has an adjustable mounting arm. It sells for about $100 (although I’ve seen them online for as low as $75 - new).

It’s a hard choice, but I think I’ll be going with the TransPod. I’m spending enough time in the car to make it worthwile, and I’m not going to be podcasting anytime soon - so the recording feature is lost on me.