I’ve been in the market for a bluetooth speakerphone for the car for awhile now. So far, my experience with my previous Garmin Nüvi 650, and my current TomTom 720 has been less then stellar in the actual phone call department. In general, I can hear the caller fairly well, but they can’t hear me. Which seems to be due to the fact that the GPS is a good distance from my face and the ambient road noise certainly doesn’t help. Sure they both have microphone options, but who needs yet another cable routed around their car? So I thought a visor mounted bluetooth speakerphone would do the trick.
I’ve had my eye on the well rated BlueAnt Supertooth3, but haven’t gotten around to ordering one yet. Instead, on impulse, I picked up the super cheap Roadmaster VR3 at Costco this weekend. Somehow I got it in my head that it was a Motorola product, which made me feel better for some reason. As it turns out, cheap applies to more than just price with this product.
Pairing was simple enough, and making and receiving calls was a no brainer, but here are the deal-breaking issues for me:
- There’s a bright blue light that flashes repeatedly. I suppose it’s indicating that your phone has an active connection (in addition to the indicator on the LCD display), but with this thing mounted on your visor, it’s horribly distracting. Particularly at night time. I thought for sure there would be a way to disable this light, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
- Even with the thing probably 8 inches from my face, I couldn’t be heard by the caller.
- The flip down, backlit LCD display is almost useless. Caller ID numbers that pop up are somewhat hard to decipher because they’re so closely kerned together, and there’s no logical spacing for the area code and prefix.
- General build quality is weak. From the creaky construction to the sickly sounding audio feedback when pushing buttons; it’s embarassing to have hanging in your car.
So there ya go. I’ll be returning this POS to Costco ASAP. Honestly the built-in speakerphone on my iPhone has been better than all other speakerphone devices I’ve tried in the car. So ultimately, I’ll probably stick with the iPhone and occasionally using the earbud headset for longer calls. I really can’t be bothered with one more device to charge anyway.
ZOMG! The amount of commentary and pseudo punditry about the iPhone is frankly…breathtaking. Or do I mean nauseating? Either way, I wanted to address one specific issue that’s running rampant around the web currently. You see…Steve Jobs proclaimed to his flock, that the OS behind the iPhone, was in fact none other than OS X. I suppose Steve could have gone on to explain this aspect a bit better, but he had features to cover people!!
