4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Gets the job done, but overpriced
Date of Review: Aug 21, 2008
The Bottom Line: It works, but not worth the money. Try to get a better deal on it, or find another brand. Can still be fuzzy. Smartscan isn't worth the extra $40.
I recently updated my ipod shuffle to the 3rd generation ipod nano. I mainly did this because I wanted to listen to music in my car without having to dig through my cds and risk crashing my car. Unfortunately, I don't have an aux in cable in my cd player AND my tape player is broken, so the cheapest option I had was an fm transmitter. I say unfortunately because I've ridden in cars with these things before, and they can be static-y and annoying.
I took a trip to Best Buy to check out their products. Fm transmitters vary in price from about $40 to over $100. I chose this model, one of the more expensive, because it has something called smartscan technology. This means that it will scan all of the radio frequencies and tell you the three that are your best options for transmitting. I thought this would be a lot easier than fiddling with my radio constantly.
This Griffin model comes with 7 different adapters for the different ipod styles, but I preferred to use it without one because I have my nano in a case. You plug the thing into your cigarette lighter and plug the nano into it. This is easy to do and takes only a few seconds.
By pressing function and then pressing scan, the transmitter scans the radio stations for you and automatically stores the best 3. This feature is helpful, but sometimes the stations that were selected were still fuzzy. I found that manually adjusting the 3 best stations up or down a few notches is usually the best way to go.
Depending on where your cigarette lighter is, your ipod can be easy to see or hard to access. Mine is right above the gear shift, so it was convenient to skip songs and press play, but hard to search for specific songs. The cord is bendable, so you can adjust the position a bit, but sometimes, this messes up the transmission. It also charges your ipod, so you won't run out of batteries on the road.
I think this transmitter is overpriced, and I'm taking it back because I found a similar version for less money on ebay. For $90, I feel like it should work all the time and never be fuzzy, but this isn't the case. This is one of the better transmitters I've seen, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you can get a better deal.
