Design
Quick, follow this link and have a look at Altec Lansing's M602. Now look at the product image above. There's not much in it, aside from the T612 featuring an iPhone, and the M602 an older iPod, and a touch of black paint rather than silver/white.
Some might say that keeping the same design over several years shows confidence in your industrial design processes; others might call it lazy. Certainly, without a doubt, the T612's "stick the iPod/iPhone out in the centre" design is rather striking, and makes it very clear what the central focus of the unit ought to be; on Apple's shiny tech toys. Controls on the T612 are on the minimal side, with simple volume, bass and treble controls (with its own blue disco lights) to contend with. In an age of touchscreen iPod Touch and iPhones, this is no great problem, and the T612 does also ship with a remote control for even more extended operation.
Those who prefer other brands of player (or those who own multiple MP3 players) aren't excluded, as the T612 hides an auxiliary 3.5mm input on the rear. It's a less attractive proposition, however, and we can't see too many buyers meeting Altec Lansing's AU$399 price point if they don't already have an iPhone.
Features
The T612 is quite obviously an iPod/iPhone speaker system — if you haven't gathered that by now, you're probably reading the wrong website — but its particular claim to fame is that it's fully compatible with the iPhone 3G.
So what does "fully compatible" actually mean? Well, when owners of the iPhone 3G got their shiny phone bricks home, many of them were perturbed to note that a large number of speaker systems didn't in fact work with the iPhone 3G as smoothly as they might have expected. There's two distinct problems at play here. Firstly, the iPhone 3G marks Apple's official departure from supporting 12V FireWire-based charging pins, something that's been standard on the iPod Dock connector for some time. It instead uses the 5V USB pin, and if your existing speaker didn't use that, you would find it incapable of charging the iPhone 3G. This wasn't an entirely new development, but those who had older iPod gear may have been surprised by it.
The second issue is one of interference. If you've ever placed your mobile a bit too close to speakers when it's roaming for coverage towers, or a call is incoming, you'd be familiar with the interesting electronica that the speakers will sometimes come forward with, thanks to electromagnetic interference. Plugging an iPhone 3G into a non-shielded unit usually brings forward a little screen that suggests you should flick the iPhone 3G into flight mode, which will work for music playback — but this leaves you without any phone capability at all! Altec Lansing claims the T612 is shielded, and shouldn't hit that particular problem.
One feature we really would have liked to see from the T612 was some form of video output. Outside the shuffle, every new iPod supports video, and it's a pity that it's absent here.
Performance
Most iPod speaker systems contained within a single unit suffer from the same basic problem. With all the speakers crammed into a relatively tiny space, there's little scope to really fill a room with stereo music, simply because every sound element is essentially coming from the same place. It's a trap that the T612 falls into to a certain extent, and it's pretty clear that this is best suited as a desktop unit, as the best sound shoots straight out in front of it.
Audio quality at most volumes was generally good for a desktop designed unit, although we noticed a lot of distortion at higher volumes; this is again a common failing for iPod speaker units. The phone integration works quite well, with music dipping away when calls came in, and absolutely no distortion or weird beeping noises during our test period. We also tested with other iPod models, including an iPod Touch and iPod Nano, both of which worked flawlessly, although the Nano did look rather hopelessly small in front of the T612's speaker array.
Ultimately, though, the T612's market will be almost exclusively iPhone 3G owners; everyone else can cherry pick the iPod Speaker market (especially at this asking price) for units. Given the iPhone 3G's rather exceptional first fortnight sales, we'd expect a raft of shielded units that also charge the iPhone 3G within a short period of time, as well.
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