When I saw the MINIKIT Slim (hereafter referred to as "the Slim") advertised in the TreoCentral store, I figured it was just a slimmed-down version of the MINIKIT. I mean, it looks somewhat similar: there's the same 2-button interface (one red and one green, like on just about every phone out there nowadays) and a nice volume knob for tactile volume adjustment and menu selection. There is a miniUSB charging port and a charging light indicator to let you know when the device is charging. The Slim comes packaged with a miniUSB car charged and a miniUSB-to-USB cable for charging the device via USB port on your computer.
So by the initial looks of the device, the Slim is just a smaller, thinner, lighter MINIKIT. But then when you look a little closer you'll notice that there are some pretty significant design differences other than the more obvious aesthetic ones. For one, there is no dedicated power button on the Slim, which is just fine with me. Just hold the red button down for a couple seconds (like on a Centro or a PalmOS Treo) to turn the speakerphone on or off. You'll also notice that there is no traditional "speaker" on the Slim, which uses a vibrating panel instead. According to the Parrot website, the vibrating panel is "connected to the audio circuit and vibrates to reproduce natural, open sound."
Where the Slim really differentiates itself from the original MINIKIT is with its highly advanced contact/voice recognition setup. The MINIKIT requires you to send each individual contact from your phone to the speakerphone one-at-a-time, recording voice tags for each as you go. This can be rather cumbersome. The Slim receives all of your contacts from your phone each time you connect. That's right, all of your contacts (up to 1,000, that is, and if you have more than that, well, aren't you popular?), and you don't have to record voice tags for any of them. The Slim employs incredible text-to-speech synthesis of all of the contacts in your phone, and combines that text-to-speech with excellent voice recognition. To make a long story short, the Slim recognizes your voice and matches your words with your contacts quickly and easily, and with amazing results. I have about 150 or so contacts in my phone, and I have found it difficult to fool the Slim. As long as you speak with some degree of clarity and without a ridiculous amount of background noise, the Slim is spot-on.
Press the green button and the Slim will ask, in its sweet-sounding-yet-SAM-like English accent, "Who do you want to call?" Say "Catherine Hall" and the Slim will repeat the name and will ask which of the contact's numbers (Home, Work, Cell Phone) you want to call, if there are several for the contact. (That's right, the Slim isn't restricted to 1,000 phone numbers, the restriction is to 1,000 contacts. A single contact can contain several phone numbers.) And the device isn't very particular to how you issue the commands: say "Catherine Hall" or "Call Catherine's cell phone," or "Catherine at work" and the Slim will know what you're getting at. The voice recognition logic is top-notch, to say the least.
The Slim also incorporates most, if not all of the little nuances that were used by its other predecessors. When a call comes in, the Slim will match the incoming number with the contact in its memory (if the number is from one of your stored contacts, of course), and use the text-to-speech functionality to announce the name of the incoming caller.
And there is another huge improvement over the MINIKIT that could easily go unnoticed, which involves updating the programmed contacts. The MINIKIT didn't provide any way for you to update a contact; if you changed a number of a contact in your phone, the MINIKIT would never know, as the contact information was stored in the device. There was no way to delete or edit a previously-programmed contact. In fact, the only way to update any of your contacts was to erase all of them from the device and send them back, which also required you to re-record all of the voice tags. Although, realistically speaking, there probably aren't all that many times when somebody you know will actually change a phone number, this was a major omission that I didn't immediately catch when I reviewed the MINIKIT. The Slim totally alleviates this problem, as each time you connect the speakerphone with your cell phone, the Slim automatically synchronizes its internal phone book with the contact list in your cell phone. And don't worry: the process takes less than 30 seconds to update my contact list of about 150 names. This is huge, as you never have to worry about updating any of the contacts on the Slim. Just go through the normal process of editing your contact list on your phone and they will automatically update on the Slim when you connect to it.
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