Under The Bridge

So already in our fledging Cocoa Touch programming career we’ve noticed an issue that is rather obvious once you think about it: It’s rather hard to do a group demo/review with one of these devices. Particularly when your projects are things like games or media players that involve, you know, sound.

But, while we were checking out the Vancouver Apple Store grand opening this morning, we stumbled across on their display tables a wonderful way to address this problem, which has a number of other benefits as well: the Sonic Impact i-F3 portable iPod clock radio! Here’s what it looks like:

Basically, it’s a zippered hard case about 10″ x 8″ x 3″ that contains a lithium battery powered FM clock radio with an iPod dock that works just fiiiine with our development iPod touch. So we can just schlep this to our meeting, pop it open, and demo away with everyone able to hear, and it propped up nicely so they have at least a chance of seeing. This rocks. They promise an iPhone version soon apparently, but since I imagine most of you have an iPod touch anyway for testing, for immediate purposes this’ll probably be fine.

It’s compatible with all other forms of iPods as well, either through the dock connector or line input; it has an internal lithium battery which supposedly lasts 15 hours, which I haven’t actually owned the thing as long as so I can’t verify directly, but it’s certainly going to be a good bit longer than the iPod lasts on its own, another indispensable feature for doing the meeting rounds; and has controls built in as well as having a remote tucked away in a hidden compartment. And there’s another hidden compartment behind the display for storing the iPod in while on the move.

So. If you need to do Cocoa Touch program presentation/reviews, and an iPod touch is good enough for your purposes, this is a well-nigh indispensable piece of kit, in our humble opinion. And if you would like an iPod-friendly travel clock radio, or just a sturdy portable iPod speaker set (the speakers aren’t going to wow any audiophiles, but there’s rather more bass there than you’d expect from a clock radio) then we figure this is probably an excellent choice for you as well.

Indeed, we like it so much that we’re going to add a Hardware page specifically for it to our Under The Bridge Store, which of course we think you should all go visit immediately and buy some stuff so that we can get ourselves more fun toys to review for you!