JBL On Time Micro: Love it...for $100 less
The JBL On Time Micro offers pretty much everything you'd want from a bedside iPod speaker dock, such as an AM/FM radio, multiple alarms, good audio, and a remote control. We just wish it did all that for about a third of the price.
Peruse any electronics store, whether virtual or brick-and-mortar, and you'll be overwhelmed by the breadth of choices offered in the iPod speaker category. As such, it is of the utmost importance that manufacturers of such goods make their products not just stand but jump out from the crowd. Taking an otherwise fairly standard iPod-ready AM/FM radio alarm clock and slapping a $250 price tag on it is surely one way of doing this; we're just not sure it's the right way. This is what JBL has done with the latest addition to its On Time speaker dock, the Micro. The sleek and compact unit sounds good and offers a nice array of features, but the remote is overly complex and the whole package is overpriced by about $100.