About.com Rating
Works with
iPod Video
iPod nano
4th generation iPod
iPod mini
The Good
Works great with TVs/Home Stereos
Dead simple to set up
Bridges gap between iTunes and TV
The Bad
Remote is sometimes slow to respond
The Price
US$149.99
Strong Apple TV Competitor, with No Wireless, Lower Price
The DLO HomeDock Deluxe — a dock that play music, movies, and TV shows from your iPod on your TV/home entertainment system — brings the Apple TV to mind right away.
The two devices basically do the same thing. And the DLO HomeDock Deluxe does this very, very well.
Unlike the Apple TV, the HomeDock Deluxe does not include wireless syncing of content with iTunes, a hard drive for storage, or any of the many features coming to the Apple TV in the future that will make it the center of the networked living room.
But none of this is a knock on the DLO HomeDock Deluxe. It’s just a clarification that though the two devices do some similar things, they’re not the same. And that’s OK: the DLO HomeDock Deluxe is a terrific product.
Given that the iTunes Store lets consumers purchase downloadable movies and TV shows, this kind of product is a natural fit. Watching TV and movies on the iPod can be a bit of a chore, so showing this content on the TV makes a lot of sense. If you plan to enjoy your iPod content this way, though, get a nice TV and entertainment system. My seven-year-old TV, with its weak built-in speakers, was a bit overmatched by the HomeDock Deluxe.
The dock is extremely simple to set up. Just plug it into a power source, connect the included cables to your TV or entertainment system, dock the iPod, and tune your TV to the same channel you use to watch DVDs. When you do this, you’ll see DLO’s easy-to-navigate onscreen menu for accessing the content on your iPod.
From there, you can play music, podcasts, or audio books in an interface that looks a bit like FrontRow. You can watch movies or TV shows directly on your TV with just a few clicks of the remote control.
And it’s not much more complex than that. The DLO HomeDock Deluxe does just what it sets out to do very well, very easily.
The dock offers a few other nice features – it charges your iPod while it’s docked, it can connect to computers to sync the iPod via USB, external speakers are supported, there is a tool to create on-the-fly playlists – but its main features are probably the key attractions here.
And though it’s no Apple TV in terms of future-facing features (keep in mind, though, that it’s half the price), until the price and content for the Apple TV became more compelling, the DLO HomeDock Deluxe is a great option for anyone who wants to combine their home entertainment system and iPod content.