The Griffin Travel speaker takes away the hassle of having to remember additional batteries with an iPod travel dock. That's because the speaker is powered directly from your iPod using the 30-pin connector dock.

The obvious concern with this is that it would severely drain your iPod's battery. But we didn't find this to be the case at all. We tested the speaker for around 12 hours, with a fully charged 120GB iPod classic and the iPod's battery indicator still signalled around a quarter of the battery's life was left.

Now Apple advertise the classic as having 36 hours playback on a full charge, so there is obviously some draw - but it's minimal and over a few nights away from home you're hardly going to notice it as being an issue.

It's all well and good having a good USP like the battery power but the speaker still needs to sound good. And thankfully, it does. Well, it sounds as good as you'd expect a sub £30 travel-speaker to sound at least. It's fairly tinny but that's no surprise with such a small setup, but the volume level is pretty impressive. It is much louder than we expected without getting overly distorted and the sound has a nice rich feel, which was quite surprising.

It's very plasticy, but it's also very compact. You could slip this dock into your rucksack and it would hardly take up any space. Plus, the hard-plastic its made up of makes it quite robust - so it can take a bit of a bashing on-route, which it is bound to get if you're lugging it around with you on your travels.