Everybody is pinching pennies these days.

A year ago you may have been planning on buying a nice shiny new car with an iPhone compatible 18 speaker sound system with integrated Bluetooth. All you would have to do is get near that eight cylinder beauty and all iPhone music would routed automagically through a system so full of buttons it would make an F-16 Fighter pilot fell right at home.

Now you are openly wondering if you'll be downsized, modernized, or marginalized out of your current job. No iPhone for you, your trusty third gen iPod is good enough, and that seven year old rust bucket you're driving is looking pretty good now. It has decent fuel economy, it's comfy, it contains lots of fond and maybe not so fond memories and, most importantly, it's paid for.

All you need to do is spend a little bit to get a few minor mechanical problems fixed and you are good to go another 50,000, heck, make that another 100,000 miles. What's not to like?

Of course, it would be nice if you had some way to play your iPod music on the single disc CD player/AM-FM radio sound system. You could spend a few hundred bucks and upgrade the system, get something with an auxiliary jack so you can just plug your iPod in, but that's more money spent that you really should be saving.

You could get one of those FM transmitters, but you've heard they were finicky things that clutter your console with wires, and they really sound like crap.

What's a penny pincher to do?

I may have an answer for you. Griffin Technologies sent me the latest incarnation of their Road Trip Transmitter to look over. I've been playing with it for about two weeks now and so far, I'm a fan.

The new Road Trip transmitter is the same basic technology behind every FM transmitter used to broadcast your iPod tunes to an empty channel on your radio dial, but this one has been refined. Gone are all those silly wires!

You might remember the old Road Trip which had a somewhat clunky arm. It did away wih wires as well, but it was... well, clunky.

The new Road Trip is a single unit with a cigarette lighter plug on one end, a really interesting looking dock on the other, and in between is a stiff, but bendable post.

The idea is to stick the plug into the lighter and your iPod or iPhone in on the other. Bend the post into a position that makes the iPod easy to see and use, tune the Road Trip and your FM radio to the same station and viola! Music!

The post is stiff enough to hold up your iPod without any other support, and once you've bent it to your liking, it stays put. Even if you like to drive over speed-bumps at 40 mph your iPod will wobble, but it won't fall down.

That's mostly due to a smartly engineered plug that is designed to fit snugly and allow as little wiggle as possible.

The smart engineering doesn't end there. Griffin uses a system called SmartScan which checks out all of the local FM stations in your area and finds and attempts to find the three clearest bands on your dial. The idea is that when you fire up your Road Trip you pick the best of the three preset bands and dial your radio to that fequency. In practice, however, none of the channels SmartScan found were empty enough to give the best sound. In fact, some channels were occpuied. Griffin wisely offers manual tuning and lets you preset channels you know are clear. This setup helps you get the best possible sound. I preset my car's stereo to two of the three Road Trip presets and the sound has been consistently impressive.

FM transmitters will never be as good as a wired connection, but as FM transmitters go Road Trip is about as good as you can get. Highs and lows come through nicely at all volumes though you can hear some background hiss between songs and in soft passages when you have your radio cranked.

Let's go back to the dock end of the Road Trip for a moment. This is the end that contains the transmitter. On the front are three buttons with raised dots on them: from left to right they are the station scanner/selector, play/pause, and scan forward/nest song buttons.

I understand the design philosophy behind using only three buttons. it's easy to control by touch only. Slide your finger over the buttons from either left or right and you instantly know what controls what. The problem, of course, is that they've sacrificed the previous song/scan backwards button, so if you want to hear that last tune over again you'll have to do it from your iPod, which forces your to look away from the road and kinda defeats the purpose of having the raised dots on the buttons in the first place. Still, for everything but the scan backwards button, this setup works well. When I'm driving along I have no problem locating the appropriate button to skip forward without looking away from traffic.

The display, which shows a lot of information depending on which function you are using at the time, is bright and easy to read even in strong sunlight. If you've set Road Trip up right you likely won't need to look at the display at all.

As I mentioned earlier, setup is easy, but Road Trip lets you make all sorts of adjustments so that you get the most out of it. You can, for instance, manually tune your stations and preset them, you can set it to mono-mode for when you're listening to audiobooks or podcasts, and you can turn off SmartSound, Griffin's technology that tries to produce the best sound for a given station. The only thing I noticed when I turned off SmartSound was that the music was a few decibels lower. Of course, it's hard to be critical of music sent and received over FM, and the extra boost does help make the music more enjoyable.

One last thing about the dock; included in the package are six different dock clamps. They clamp onto the end of the Road Trip and hold you iPod or iPhone firmly in place. Each is labeled so you know which one to use on which device. I've used my iPhone 3G, third gen iPod, and second gen nano on this Road Trip and so far all never budged as I whipped around corners, slammed on breaks, and did my best to shake the device loose without attracting the attention of the cops and getting a ticket.

So, what happens when the economy improves, you find a great paying job, or win the lottery and you find that you can afford that shiny new car with auxiliary jacked sound system? Not to worry; this Road Trip will let you plug your iPod into the AUX port of your new sound system. Yes, it's a wire, but it's only one, it's thin, and you can still charge and control your iPod from Road trip, only now it sounds even better.

I honestly can't find much, beyond SmartScan not living up to its name, to fault this version of Road Trip on. It addresses all of the major issues with using FM Transmitters to play iPod music in your car and it does so with some decent engineering and a sense of style.

The only other problem with this arrangement that I've come across, and it's true for any transmitter used with the iPhone, is that when you get a phone call you'll have to grab the iPhone form the dock to take it. This is less cumbersome than you might think because the iPhone is held up for you by Road Trip. Griffin recommends having a Bluetooth headset or speaker handy to take calls hands free. I have a Bluetooth headset and while this works I find that I wind up fumbling to get the headset in my ear, which is another distraction from driving. Wearing the headset all the time interferes with listening to music, and a Bluetooth speaker requires power and more wires. You'll just have to find an arrangement that works best for you. For me, the headset seems to work, even with the fumbling.

There will be some people who can't use FM transmitters because of the crowded airwaves where they live. For the rest of us who find that hard connecting our iPods to our car's music system is too costly or impractical, Griffin's Road Trip FM Transmitter with SmartScan is a very good option that works.

So, if you need tunes in your old ride and are considering the Road Trip I *Highly Recommend one, you'll have even more reason to like your old heap.

* Note: My rating system goes like this;

• Get it Now! - Highest rating and an absolute must-have
• Highly recommend - Minor flaws, but a great product
• Recommend - Flawed, but still a solid product
• So-so - Problem product that may find a niche market
• Avoid - Why did they bother making it? A money waster.

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.