More Stuff from Griffin; TuneJuice, Lapel Mic, and Dock800

Remember way back in the good old days, sometime last week, when Griffin Technology wasn’t announcing new products every single day?

The latest batch from Griffin features one item I am very excited about and two that don’t do much for me.

TuneJuice is a battery pack for your iPod. Let’s say you’re out hiking and rocking out to some vintage Wham! tunes when all of a sudden your iPod’s battery dies. Some might take that as a good thing, but the George Michael lover in you needs to know if he was woken up before they went went.

That’s where TuneJuice comes in. Thanks to one 9volt battery you can get up to 8 more hours of play from an iPod (only 4 if it is completely drained though). It is priced at $19.99 and will be shipping soon.

Griffin Lapel Mic Lapel Mic seems to be aimed squarely at all you wacky podcasters out there. Used in combination with the iTalk you can record high quality sound directly onto your iPod. Griffin says this product is perfect for, ‘reporters, presenters, and students,’ and a ’great new accessory for iPod owners everywhere.’ Priced at $14.99, this iPod owner will pass.

Finally, the real excitement in this post comes from the Dock800, a simple product that makes me Dock800 happy. Basically it is an iPod connector that uses FireWire800 instead of the FireWire400 that the Apple connector uses. Griffin seems to be positioning it as a way to free up your regular FireWire ports for other duties, but it seems to me that this will make song transfers to the iPod even faster, and who doesn’t like faster? This little gem ships for $14.99 and I will be placing my order soon (unless the good folks at Griffin would like to send me a review unit).

Am I missing something? Would the iPod need to be programmed with FireWire800 support as Zach suggests?

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Remember way back in the good old days, sometime last week, when Griffin Technology wasn’t announcing new products every single...

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CyBeR

Also, no way in hell is the 1.8" hdd in the iPod fast enough to keep up even with FireWire 400. That would mean that the little thing could transfer about 40MB/sec. It's pretty fast, but I doubt it's *that* fast ;) The handyness of this product is that you can use the FireWire800 port on your mac while the other two are filled up.

January 15 2005 at 11:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Oliver

I think the previous comments are correct, nevertheless the Dock800 is a good product to have. I'm sure there are many Powermac owners who use all of their FW ports but not their FW800 port(s). So even though you won't see high throughput this cable will at least allow you to use the free port.

January 15 2005 at 4:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

yogel

The iPod would have to have FireWire 800 support included in it's firmware for it to be able to run at 800 speed. The hardware in the Mac automatically negotiates the fastest speed the device will run at with the device. It works because FireWire 800 still support 400 devices... So yes - they would have to write new firmware for an iPod. But for the reasons _victor said, this is unlikely.

January 15 2005 at 3:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

superpixel

Actually it's probably more of an issue with the hard drive. It's fast, but not really fast enough to keep up with DV, which is only 3.5 MB/sec. Besides, once initial setup I don't think syncing takes too terribly long... _victor

January 14 2005 at 10:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ijw

Zach's right. The iPod hardware doesn't support it. You can't just get FW800 support through a firmware update or something.

January 14 2005 at 6:54 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Zach

I think the iPod would need to actually support FW800 in order for it to go any faster. I can't imagine them not touting a 100% increase in speed if it were there.

January 14 2005 at 6:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply