Saturday, January 31, 2009
New dock for iPods - the I-Tel
This is copied from an email from blind iPod guru Brian Hartgen.
The I-Tel is a product designed to make your existing iPod talk. It will work with iPods which are capable of docking station connectivity since that is essentially what the I-Tel is, a docking station. The iPod sits inside the I-Tel and if you go to the Cobolt web site you can see a picture of it. The iPod Shuffle cannot be used by I-Tel because it does not have docking station connectivity but most iPods do, certainly the larger capacity devices such as the Nano or even the iPod Touch and Classic.
Rather than using the wheel of the iPod to control functionality, the wheel is represented on the I-Tel by four buttons which are well defined controls. There is a fifth button in the centre to represent the centre of the wheel and two lower buttons for volume adjustment.
The I-Tel is capable of speaking all menu items on the iPod, together with items such as genre, album and track titles. It uses a newly developed speech system. That is about as far as I can go on that subject because I have not seen the product.
If this works, the I-Tel could be extremely beneficial for those people who want to use their iPods to listen to music purchased from the iTunes music store or other material transferred to the iPod via iTunes.
¶ 5:46 PM 
