Bose SoundDock 10 sits a few notches above any of its stablemates, both in size and price—this thing is as heavy as a stereo receiver, and about a foot tall. (Asked about the size, a Bose engineer said that he liked to think of it as transportable, not portable. Uh!) I'm not really sure what the significance of the "10" moniker is, but if Apple can randomly assign nice, round, out-of-order numbers to their products, why can't Bose, hmm?

They've done something kinda cool with the dock connector, which can be swapped out to suit different players, or, if you've got an extra $150 laying around, a stereo Bluetooth adapter, which feels like it should've been built in there in the first place, honestly. Bose threw in a composite video port for good measure, so you can view photos and videos on your TV.

Anyway, portability isn't really the point here, since this thing is meant to sit on a table—probably a well-polished one, in an immaculate, nautical-themed sitting room—and pretty much fill the role that the Wave radios used to: To be smaller than a proper stereo, but not to sound like crap. In fact, there's a lot of shared DNA there, since the SoundDock 10 uses the same scrunched audio waveguide piping that made the Wave radios sound, well, kinda big. And for what it's worth, the SoundDock 10 sounds even bigger, mostly thanks to this:

This here lump of speaker accompanies two "Twiddlers," which is Bose speak for "tweeters that do midrange, too, we promise." Together they throw respectable sound, which is surprisingly powerful at the very low end, and phenomenally clear in the rest of the range, most of the time. Classical music, Bose's demo genre of choice, sounds predictably great, but anything noisier, like rock music, starts to blend together, reminding you that you're still listening to an iPod dock. Which you are!

That's the obvious hangup with the SoundDock 10: It's $600, and it a dock. Granted, it's easily the best iPod dock I've ever heard, but it's still recognizable as such, and it's not that much cheaper than a real two-speaker stereo system. But hey, it's also a dock in the good way—it's easy to connect things to, to move around, and it won't clutter up your room with wires—so if those are your top priorities, docks don't get much better than this. The SoundDock 10 will be available from Sept 21. [Bose]

There are two kinds of docks: ones that let you control music from the iPod itself and ones that take control of the iPod, like BMW's notorious first dock and many subsequent (and more affordable) accessories since. The Bose SoundDock is an example of the former; the DLO HomeDock and Harman Kardon's Bridge dock are examples of the latter.

Regardless of the dock type, regardless of whether the iPhone is set for ring or vibrate, here's what happens: you are rocking out to your music when it suddenly—though gracefully—fades out. If it's on ring, you hear the one of the cheesy Apple ringtones, but it doesn't play through the system, it plays through the iPhone speaker. (If it's vibe, you may not hear anything.) You can even answer in-dock, and tap the speaker button to put the call on speakerphone. The instant you hang up, your music fades back in, no problem.

The video dock, on the other hand, was a total bust. Mind you, I only tried one, the Memorex iFlip, but the prospects are grim. Since iPhone doesn't have the video options screen that a video iPod does, you can't choose to route the video out. Since it would never play video internally and externally at the same time, it seems video is doomed to stay in the iPhone forever. And that "audio interference" Apple mentioned, well, the iFlip is the first time we heard it. A low, digitally unpleasant moan. More updates on that subject soon.

This is mixed news for every iPhone aspirant who has spend hundreds on iPod docks and accessories, but still it's not a comprehensive, scientific study. We will continue to test and report back to you as we learn more.

Comprehensive iPhone Coverage [Gizmodo]

A little hint: if you don't really need a black iPod boombox, consider the Klipsch iGroove, which sounds just as good as the SoundDock but costs $50 less.

Bose's Black Beauty [GadgetCandy]