I find I can't hear Maemo Mapper/flite over road noise. So I'm thinking of getting this amplified speaker. It's 1.2 Watts per channel. (I haven't found online what the N800's is to compare.)

DX also has this one, which has other features and is larger but also is rated at 1.2 watts/channel. (I would have wanted this one before I had the Tablet, but seems redundant now unless it were louder.)

There are a number of complaints on the forum about flite being too soft for in-car use (at least for car's like mine!), but I haven't seen any remedies. My experience with using an FM transmitter to hear it through the car radio hasn't been great, though that might be the specific transmitter.

Well, I used to have an amped-up flite wrapper here; it's slow, since it has to run flite, then convert the sound, then output it. Maybe it could be run as a pipeline now that we have 400MHz, but I never looked at it again since Chinook came out; I just set Maemo Mapper to announce earlier to make up for it...

The other option is to use an alsa mixer (from Debian, I didn't find a native one ) and crank the DMA slider up -- it's a very sensitive gain on all outputs, and easily drives the speakers into horrific distortion, even from flite.

Oh, or you could use powered speakers, but you already figured that out; the only ones I've used plug into 110AC and probably make 5 or 10 watts. No clue if those will work, but the main issue is whether you can get enough gain to raise flite from its quietude; the power should be ample.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics...io-video/9e68/

or search for the olympia soundbug. it turns flat smooth surfaces such as your windshield into a speaker with a suction cup (perfect for the car)

Thanks, that's an unusual approach! I'd heard of these before but never heard them, and hadn't thought of them for the car. The pro and user reviews aren't too positive, though they appear to be reviewing a different version than what you linked to. Have you tried it? Does it, on a windshield, even sound good enough for music? Is a single unit loud enough? Does it actually have a suction cup (which isn't pictured in the ad you linked)?

BTW, DX has something similar (I think) but, very unlike DX, for a higher price. It also happens to look like a pig.

Nice pig Gerald... Nevermind about the Soundbugg. I just searched all over the internet and the official Olympia website is no more. I'm guessing they went out of business. I've never used either to be honest. I think I just had an even better idea for the issue at hand. You can buy FM Transmitters that will put the audio from your device onto a station of your choosing. Then you can crank it up as loud as your car speakers will go...