Hands-on with Altec Lansing's T612 iPhone docking speakers

Yeah, yeah, we know -- another iP** dock -- but this is actually one of the first docking audio speakers approved to work with the iPhone without either dropping into airplane mode or assaulting your ears with janky GSM signal noise (it also docks regular old iPods, of course). To boot, it charges the thing and has incoming call support -- more than slightly mitigated by the fact that you still have to actually remove the phone from the dock to take the call, a drawback the Altec Lansing rep said was because Apple neglected to include support for passing call audio across the docking interface. Still, if you happen to use your iPhone as jukebox at home or work, you can pick up this quite decent-sounding speaker system in February if it's worth $200 to you.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 10th 2008 6:35PM]

I have the Zune dock....sound quality is poor.

[rodan32 Posted Jan 10th 2008 7:56PM]

For the $35-odd bucks I paid for mine, sounds great =)

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 10th 2008 6:55PM]

It really isn't worth it to me.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 10th 2008 7:50PM]

What about bluetooth?

[SSteven Posted Jan 11th 2008 10:28AM]

Bluetooth would really be the way to go here. The downside is you'd go through the battery a lot faster without docking it to charge.

The biggest loss is I want to link to my car's system without taking the device out of my pocket. Why leave that kind of seamless integration to phone use only? This is already getting common with car keys themselves, so why not music players? It's not just Apple though--I don't know of any mp3 player that seamlessly uses bluetooth to link to a car's system.

I have an iPhone, but I'm objective enough to know the bluetooth support is lame as hell compared to what it COULD be.

[Are these my pants Posted Jan 10th 2008 7:16PM]

The official death of HiFi has occued. People are now using their phones as their home audio source.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 10th 2008 7:29PM]

If that's what you're going by, then it died years ago when multi-gig PMP/DAPs started coming out.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 10th 2008 8:23PM]

What a shallow observation. Will you still say that when said phones have 300gbs of flash memory and sites only sell 300kbs mp3s and FLAC formatted songs?

[TheJason Posted Jan 10th 2008 7:34PM]

Unsightly...

[thephantom Posted Jan 10th 2008 7:37PM]

Stolen music? Maybe.