Fusion CA-IP500 – Weaselly The Most Cunning iPod Thing Ever!

Shown to me on a ‘Tell anyone and I will have to kill you!’ basis in car park at the Modified Nationals (sounds kinda sleazy don’t it?) the new Fusion CA-IP500 is a darn clever piece of kit. I admit I did break embargo by telling a BBC driver about it as I nagged the poor fellow all the way to TV centre about his car HiFi as he had an iPod lying around on a wire on his car seat.
The new Fusion caip500 is another of the legion of the Made For iPod programme products but it has a system so bloody brilliant you can’t believe no-one has done it before. It’s as obvious as a whale’s whanger once you have seen it. Thanks to a set of horribly expensive tooling (That’d be why no-one else has had the balls to do it before then&;) the new regular-sized headunit can literally eat your iPod by opening up like Monstro the Whale and swallowing it whole into a set of iPod-holding plastic ‘mandibles’ covering Classic Generation 5 & 6, iTouch and Nano Gen 2 & 3 ‘Pods.

The Fusion CAIP500 has a normal flip-down front. Well it’s not that normal as it has a superb blue Organic Electro Luminescent (OEL) display on the front (Now known simply as Organic LED or OLED) that shows all the action inside. The rotary doodad works like an Apple click wheel and you simply select one of a slew of plastic housings – for all models right down to Shuffle and stash the whole assembly in the gap within the product behind the face. (And yes there is some extra cubic for those for whom the word ‘stash’ has more resonance.)

So no more dangly, glove-box hidden or specially-housed iPods. One old radio out, one new iPod container/FM radio in. Simple and cheap at £149.00 as it has a 4 x 50w SRS-Wow sound shaping equipped MOSFET power chip on board with a bass, mid and a treble control. There’s also a full-on set of line outs, including subwoofer. We’ll be testing one soon with a bit of luck but is does look cool and so bloody clever&;.