I bought a
Harmon/Kardon Drive+Play a few months ago when they hit $19. Yes, nineteen bucks. I ordered it from Buy.com and it even had free shipping. It was $200ish when it was released a couple of years ago. It's cheap because it's discontinued, replaced by the Drive+Play 2.
It works really well. It can feed your audio system via direct Aux-in via 3.5mm cable, FM-transmitter (and it's a strong one), or direct FM-input where you hook it up inline with the car's FM antenna. The direct FM input is an add on, but mine came with one in the box. Both of my cars have 3.5mm Aux-in jacks, so that's how we use it, and so the sound quality is excellent. I've tried it with the wireless FM modulator and it sounded very good. Better than the FM modulators I've used in the past. Nice & clear, though not quite as good as aux-in, unsurprisingly.
It's nice in that you can hide the iPod away somewhere safe, and you control the music via the little toggle controller and can see what you're doing on a much-larger LCD screen. It also charges iPods too. It's just a lot easier to use than fiddling with an iPod.
But it's not perfect. There are two main problems with it. #1, it's not designed for an iPhone so A, it won't charge it and B) there's a lot of GSM interference if you do use it. And #2, it doesn't work that well with Podcasts. They're in there, but there's no 'Podcasts' menu option and so you have to find them under Title/Genre. But for just music, on a normal iPod, it's perfect.
Anyway, for the super-cheap price of these things, it blows the pants off of just a stand-alone FM modulator.
