DLO Homedock HD Pro

The dock days of summer continue with another iPod dock on the horizon. Yesterday we looked at the up-coming Sony’s S-Airplay iPod dock that would transmit your tunes wirelessly over an expandable set of speakers. But those iPods, they’re diverse. DLO, maker of a whole host of iPod accessories, is on the verge of releasing the Homedock HD Pro; an upscaling dock that provides 1080i or 720p output to your television via HDMI connectors. The intention behind the product is to have people integrate the dock with their home theatre systems. For those of you with plenty of storage space on your iPod/iPhone, this could be a truly harmonious blend.

The Homedock HD Pro offers industry standard connectivity (RS-232) and IP, as well as IR output for universal remote functionality. Looking for old school? The dock also sports RCA and S-Video outputs as well. But the question that’s just begging to be asked is; what sets this dock apart from the horde? Well, besides the HD upscaling, DLO has crafted a custom interactive menu that will be displayed on-screen for your viewing pleasure. The premise behind the menu navigation is the ‘visual flow format’ (a surprisingly popular theme these days, popularized by iTunes but shamelessly stolen by Mircosoft as we’ll soon see with the fall update of the Xbox 360). Thus, you can flip by icons on screen, and even purview album art on your television. And that’s your edge.

It’s fitting to juxtapose the DLO Homedock HD Pro with Sony’s S-Airplay as they showcase opposite ends of the dock spectrum; on the one hand you have the visual aspects that will appeal to those that utilize their iPods as portable video players and on the other the you have the audiophile’s fix with a product that can integrate your music with your entire household. It seems to me that since the native function of the iPod is to play music, that most would want to take full advantage of that. Video playback on an iPod is an added feature, to supplement your music and offer video on-the-go. It’s one thing to integrate a sound-oriented dock into your home theatre because you can store your entire music library on your iPod. For a product like the Homedock HD Pro to truly carve out a niche one would need a device that can store more than a few feature length films in decent quality. That being said, if you have a lot of videos on your computer, this dock may well offer a viable means for you to watch them on your HDTV (you know, aside from a $35 video-out card and some cable).

DLO has yet to specify pricing details on the Homedock HD Pro but it is expected to ship this fall.