The iSee 360i is a $249 add-on to your iPod that gives it the ability to record video and audio from any source. The iSee provides its own color screen, navigation buttons and menus, using the iPod for storage. It was designed with pre-video-iPods in mind, and can use any in a wide range of iPod models (not the latest 60GB, though the latest 30GB works; does work with the Nano).

The presence of iPods with their own video playback capability calls out an odd decision made by the iSee's designers: For $100 more, they could have added an internal hard drive and had a nice standalone portable video/audio recorder/player. They chose to overlap with the iPod's mammoth market share as an add-on, rather than try to compete with it. Not only that, but they decided that the iSee's target demographic would be willing to pay $249 on top of the cost of their iPod to have this functionality, or at least would consider the iPod a given and not count its cost toward the total.

Some of the iSee's features are redundant with the latest video iPods, and it'd be cool if there were a device that added the recording feature to a video iPod at a lower price, omitting the (admittedly larger) color screen. Nevertheless, it sounds like an interesting way to get more life out of an older iPod, even if it is close to the cost of a new one.

I'm not sure about the experience of digitizing TV in real-time, thought it's probably faster than my current solution of burning TV to a DVD-R then ripping it on my Mac. I'd rather my TiVo just have an iPod dock.