My wife got an iPod Photo for Christmas. OK, technically we both got it, but it’s not the most shareable device, and I already have an iRiver. But anyway.

For her birthday, I wanted to get her some external speakers, preferable something dockable. The inMotion im3 seemed a good bet. Look at it there, linked from the iPod Photo Accessories page. Look at that description - “supports iPod models with Dock Connector”. Look at the nice “Compatible with iPod Photo” sticker on the box.

Yeah, well.

Yesterday was the actual birthday. We open it up, and guess what? Doesn’t fit. The iPod Photo is a bit too wide, apparently. Sure, it works with the included patch cable and line-in jack, but so do my iRiver and my daughter’s CD player. Seems reasonable to expect “compatible with…” to mean a bit more.

So let’s see whose tech support can handle this (a) best (b) fastest or (c) at all.

Altec Lansing (which makes the im3) is not the current front-runner. Emailed them yesterday, no response so far. Just trying to find out if (as implied on their site) there’s a newer version that would suit our needs. Tried to call them, but the recording explained that support hours on Sunday were between something like 9am and 5pm EST. This was at 11am EST. No option to leave a message. Click.

So today I emailed Apple, since they’re the ones who sold me the damn thing.

We’ll see what happens.

I’d love to get this to work – the speakers really are small, portable and surprisingly full-sounding. But we can’t dock / charge / use the remote / etc. No fun, and kind of expensive for a simple pair of powered speakers.