Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The Altec Lansing M202 is a neat, convenient little speaker dock, with surprisingly okay sound for a very small unit. Its strong points are its size -- much tinier than you'd think from the photos, easy to tuck into a corner of a bedside table or a shelf -- and the dual docks, allowing it to be home base for a couple's iPhones or one person's phone and iPod. The unit is straightforward and simple to operate, even without the free custom app (which is a nice touch). But the quality of its construction is surprisingly cheap considering the price; it's a flimsy, lightweight plastic speaker enclosure, with unattractive, cheap cloth permanently fixed over the speakers, and there are some obvious assembly problems like misaligned seams. (Also note that, though the unit does work with the iPhone 4, it only includes plastic dock shims for the 3G/3Gs and the iPod Touch; other iPod and iPhone models can only be docked loosely. It's a weird oversight considering the near-zero cost of these plastics.)
The sound quality is fine, even good for such a small unit, but not miraculous. Given that the unit is built around two very, very small (approx. 2.5") drivers stuck in a lightweight ported plastic enclosure, the sound it puts out is, unsurprisingly, very light on bass and tends to be almost painfully bright on some music. I found this a particular problem listening to jazz -- Miles Davis's trumpet was so bright, almost tinny, that it completely overpowered the rest of his band -- while guitar-based rock came out much better, sounding almost as well-rounded as it would on a larger stereo system. Podcasts and vocals are a good fit for this unit, but I wouldn't even want to try listening to hip-hop on something this bass-deficient.
So, this is a nice enough product just on its merits, but its price is a problem. The M202 is stuck in no-man's-land at this price point. Despite the convenience of its dual docks, this speaker dock is caught between, on the one hand, much cheaper units that are about as good as it, and on the other, only slightly more expensive ones that are much, much better. If you want a speaker dock primarily in order to listen to music, there are many others to consider first: units such as the SpeckTone Retro or the Yamaha PDX-30 are competitively priced, better-constructed, and produce far better sound. For light vocal listening and bedside convenience, you can get any of a hundred products of similar flimsy-plastic construction quality, for much less than the price of this unit, that still won't sound too much worse. Unless you have a specific need for the dual iPhone/iPod docks, the M202 is probably not the best value for your money, even though it's a perfectly nice, compact, convenient unit.
[Update: I'm revising my rating down to 2 stars after living with the unit for several more months. Despite the manufacturer's claim that the unit is shielded, loud, pulsing cellular interference has been a recurrent problem with an iPhone docked in the M202. And the endless reminders to install the dock-specific app every time the phone is re-docked are a real annoyance.]
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