This little extra packs in an FM radio tuner, remote control and a recording feature to capture FM radio broadcast on your Pod, all very cool but is it very useable or should you wait for uncle Apple to include this in the next revision. What Griffin have come up with is a rather nifty combo somewhat smaller than the iPod mini and styled to compliment your Pod, there is a largeish LCD display and a minimal number of buttons to play with.

The IFM connects to the top of the iPod with one lead and also to an extended headphone socket in a Y shaped arrangement, it looks a little messy but when all connected and hidden in a jacket using the IFM's clip it does perform its function.

A side mounted selector switches between Off, FM and Remote, all the power is taken from the Ipod battery and the IFM does it's best to manage power consumption by regulating it's use of the backlight on the IFM screen which rather weirdly is green! rather than matching the iPod's blue. Switching to remote transfers many of the iPod's key controls to the IFM, you can change tracks and adjust volume but sadly there is no text transferred from the Apple to the IFM's screen so you can't really browse or choose tracks. As well as the rather large obvious play button on the front there are also track selection buttons and volume control keys on the right hand edge of the Griffin.

Switch to FM and the Griffin comes to life adding the two features that we've always wanted on our Pod, first up the FM tuner allowing you to listen to FM radio through an iPod. There are 6 presets which are cycled through by repeatedly pushing the large central button and storing stations is achieved by a simple push and hold method.

Adding an FM tuner to an iPod is rocket science and griffin and others already have products that do this, but the Griffin IFM also has a recording function that works with the 3G and 4G iPod, just push the little red button to the top right of the main button. The IFM will then record using the iPod's storage and create a file within the Apple file system that can be replayed on the device or extracted via iTunes. Recordings are found under voice memo in the iPod menu system and are restricted by the limited sampling of the iPod itself (8KHz, WAV Mono) when recording, this isn't just a problem for the IFM but for any current iPod recording device.

There is of course a bonus feature of a voice recording which is one of those things that most of the iPod's competition feature as standard, using an inbuilt microphone the IFM can create voice memo's similar to the iTalk another Griffin product.

The saving grace for this new iPod bolt on has to be its expected price of around £35 for that the collection of features makes sense even if the recordings are limited.

Published - 29/08/2005

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