Introduction

DigiDock is a relatively new division of In Win Development Inc., a Taiwanese manufacturer of computer chassis, power supplies and digital storage devices. Established in mid-2003, DigiDock focuses on portable storage solutions as well as personal video recorders (PVR), but are not limited to them.

They provide a rather wide range of products, arranged in five main categories - FM Transmitter, Home Entertainment, VOIP, Storage and Advertisement Display. Their Home Entertainment products include media players, net radios and personal video recorders (PVR) while their VOIP products are speaker phones and telephone adaptors. They also provide storage solutions like photobanks and LAN disks.

Their FM transmitter products are a new line, created in 2004. Dubbed the AC series, which actually stands for Audio On Channel, these FM transmitters are designed to transfer audio signals from audio devices to any FM radio. There are currently seven models in this line.

Today, we are going to take a look at one of their more popular models in the AC series - the DigiDock AC-2220 FM Transmitter!

Modus Operandi

The DigiDock AC-2220 is designed as an FM transmitter for your car. That means it actually sends out radio waves that can be picked up by your car's FM stereo system. But what's the point of doing that?

Your car stereo may have a CD player that supports compressed audio formats like MP3. But even so, it requires you to first burn the MP3s into a CD. Unfortunately, that may be a hurdle too difficult for many people to cross. But if they have no problem handling a USB flash memory drive or a media player like the Apple iPod, then the DigiDock allows them to cross the digital divide and play their songs without first learning how to write CDs!

In addition, there are still many cars that do not come with CD players (what era are we in???) or only come with stereo systems that play CDs but not compressed audio formats like MP3 or WMA. With such systems, you have to upgrade to a higher-end CD player if you want to be able to support compressed audio formats. But again, the issue of writing your MP3 files to the CD will arise.

DigiDock neatly circumvents these problems by banking on the fact that more people can handle flash memory drives or media players than they can write CDs. Their AC-2220 FM transmitter, specifically, can relay audio signals from any source to your car's FM stereo system. As long as you have a stereo system that can accept FM transmission, the DigiDock AC-2220 can relay audio signals to it!

In other words, if you have a USB flash memory drive or a media player, you can hook it up to the DigiDock AC-2220 and have it channel the audio signals to your car's FM stereo. This gives you the ability to "add" MP3 playback capability to your car's stereo system, without changing it. How cool is that?

The integrated USB port can also be used to recharge any USB device. In fact, DigiDock even includes a USB adaptor for your iPod so you can recharge it on the go!