The iPod has been around for almosr 10 glorious years, bur gadgets and accessories that accompany it never seem to go out of fashion. Sometime back, Bowers and Wilkins had launched a wireless speaker dock called the Zeppelin Air that took the portable music industry by storm because of its high-quality audio streaming capability. And now the audiophile giant has launched Zeppelin Air's younger brother, Zeppelin Mini, which is designed specially for the iPod and iPhone. Zeppelin Mini promises to deliver an enriching and fun-filled sonic experience in smaller spaces of your home such as a kitchen or a bedroom.

Since this device is an offspring of the engineers at Bowers and Wilkins, packaging and presenting the Zeppelin Mini has been done with immense amount of elegance and style. The box is well-loaded to protect the dock while in transit and as you keep digging in you'll come across a pebble-shaped remote control, the main docking unit, a power adaptor and an extension cord. Moreover, a great deal of effort has gone into making this Zeppelin a docking station, and this is visible with the number of attachments that come along with it in order to connect most of apple's gadgetry ranging from the first generation iPod touch to the iPhone 3GS. Besides this, the Zeppelin Mini willingly accepts the iPod nano 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation along with the iPod classic.

The Zeppelin Mini comes built with its own internal digital signal processing electronics. These electronics grab raw audio data from your iPod and carry out their own advanced level of processing, which helps avoid additional stages of conversion from analogue to digital that can result in loss of essential data. The iPod arm is rotatable, and it can accommodate your desire to watch movies on your iPhone in the landscape mode. The Zeppelin Mini houses two 3" full-range drivers that are responsive to frequencies from 38Hz to 20 kHz, and can handle 18W of power per channel from the digital amplifier that is built into it. While the Zeppelin Mini is in use it consumes around 15W of power, but that consumption drops down to barely 0.8W when in standby mode.

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Besides accepting many of Apple's gadgets in the iPod and iPhone family, the dock also features a 3.5mm analogue jack and a USB 2.0 connection to stream and sync your iPod for various software and application updates. The Zeppelin Mini weighs approximately 2.5kg-the same as most laptops in the market. Carrying it to your friend's place for a weekend lounge session or to your farm house for a family picnic is perfect, but you need to be careful with the Zeppelin Mini as the iPod arm sticks out making it prone to damage, and even the remote control has a high chance of getring misplaced because of its small form factor.