Guilty Pleasure: Tailgater Portable iPod Dock

I have an iPod dock at home, but I'm going to level with you: it's pretty small, and its output is not great. I don't have all the technical specs on it, but suffice to say that I had to plug it into the Aux input on my regular sound system in order to get decent sound out of the thing.

That's why the Tailgater, from Ion Audio, looks like something I've just got to have. It looks like a guitar amp with an iPod dock built into it, which to me (a musician) is pretty cool in and of itself. I won't go too much into the specs, but the selling points for me are the heavy-duty construction (so it won't break when I inevitably drop it), built in carrying handle, and built in 8 hour battery with level indicator (so I always know how much juice I have left).

The only downside for me is the $200 price point, since I could most likely hook up my current iPod dock to the line input on a similarly sized battery powered amp for much cheaper - but, the reality is that I'm just too lazy to do something like that, and it wouldn't look nearly as cool as the Tailgater when I'm blasting Debbie Gibson tracks on the Jersey shore this summer.

(source: iLounge)