Review: inMotion iMV712 from Altec Lansing
Video iPods are all well and good, until you actually try to watch a video on them, I find. Then, you dice with losing your eye site, headaches and other fun things, as you try to squint. As much as I bemoan the lack of feature films on the UK version of iTunes, I really couldn’t sit through a whole one.
Unless you’ve got some way of making them bigger…. such as the inMotion speaker screen from Altec Lansing. Essentially, it’s some top quality speakers combined with a screen on the front, which will play which ever video you’ve got on your iPod (I’d recommend the Take That music video ‘Shine’).
This system comes with a remote, and unlike several similar systems, you can navigate your way around the entire iPod menu with it, which means you can change from a song to a video, rather than just skip forward and backwards between songs. Very useful.
The speakers are also top notch, with some proper bass (you really feel it if you put it on the floor!) and the fact that they wrap around the unit means you get pretty equal sound around the room. The screen is also clear and crisp, with any bad quality likely stemming from the MP4 clip itself, rather than the screen.
It’s piano black surface is lovely to look at, but is one of the worst I’ve seen for getting fingerprints over it (although I could have just been having a particularly sticky fingered day I suppose…). There’s also the slight question mark over where you’d use this. The screen is about the size of a paperback book, so too small to use as a dedicated viewing screen. And for £250, it’s slightly too expensive to use just as a speaker.
