CrunchGear

I’ve been following available iPod car integration hardware for quite some time now and could probably write a whole article about it, but the bottom line is: iPod car integration sounds fine, easy and pretty straightforward in theory, but in reality most of the products on the market behave like single speed CD-ROM drives then years ago: While one works best for you, another one might work best for another.

Also, there are two different types of integration:
1. Line-in
2. Car stereo integration

The first type only means that your car stereo has some auxiliary line-in port where you can connect your iPod to, and then you can select songs from your iPod and play them through your stereo. Works fine, but has two significant disavantages: First, your iPod won’t be charges unless you have an iPod-car charger also connected to it. Second, you have to select songs through your iPod controls, which in traffic is not only dangerous but also inconvenient especially if you have a steering wheel with controls for your car stereo.

The second type treats both disavantages above and integrates seamlessly with your car stereo. Most devices fake a CD changer to accomplish that, which means you are usually restricted to as many playlists as your CD changer interface can handle CDs (typically 6 or 10), and depending on your car stereo you might not be able to have more than 99 songs in your playlist. Still, it gives you at least 600 songs available at your fingertips, and your iPod will stay charged. While a lot of car makers claim iPod integration availability, most of them refer only to category 1, BMW is the only one who I know offers true iPod integration right now (but there might be others by now doing it as well).

The best category 2 product out there right now is iceLink Plus from Dension (http://www.dension.com/icelinkplus.php). However, it is not available for every car brand (including the one I’m driving) so I had to shop around for another one. I got one of these for my car: Monster iCruze (http://www.monstercable.com/icruze/survey/moreinfo_icruze1.asp). Not sure if this is still being sold, even though they advertise it on the Monster home page I can’t find a way anymore to get to the above location other than the direct link from Google. The installation was very easy, but the device has a lot of bugs. I RMA’ed it once because of the bugs and got one with a newer firmware, but it still has bugs (such as jumping back to the first song in the playlist after turning on the car etc.). Also, switching songs is slow compared to a real CD, luckily you can jump +/- 10 to get through a large playlist faster.

Either way, before you buy a product google around and make sure you find something that works for your car, and read up on forums about bugs and issues other people are having, otherwise you’ll end up very disappointed.

Disclaimer: I don’t work with or for any of the above named companies and anything I say here reflects only my own opinion. As stated at the top of this comment other people might feel very differently.