So now I have the Parrot MINIKIT, a Bluetooth speakerphone with voice recognition. Parrot has a long line of Bluetooth products for use in the car, including several with LCD screens which require a hard installation of some sort or another. The MINIKIT, however, is a less-complicated, portable speakerphone that can be used in and out of the car.
Instead of the traditional one-button approach to making and receiving calls, Parrot has gone with two separate buttons on the MINIKIT, with a green-lit button for answering calls and a red-lit button for ending/denying calls. I actually like having the two buttons a lot, as the interface directly mimics the approach used by just about every cell phone on the market today. With most other Bluetooth devices, you have to hold a button down or double-click a button to end or deny a call, where on the MINIKIT you just do what comes "naturally" and hit the red button.
The MINIKIT also uses a dial to control the volume of the call, as opposed to the and – buttons used by most of the similar devices I've seen and used. The dial, located prominently on the top-front of the MINIKIT, makes for much easier adjustment of the volume when you're in the car, assumedly paying attention to other stuff like cars, trucks, pedestrians and what not.
To make a call, you can use the traditional method of using the phone to find a contact and/or dial a number, or you can use the voice recognition feature. The voice recognition feature is very, very effective if your phone is capable of sending contacts via Bluetooth and you have it set up properly. (A side note to save Windows Mobile users a TON of frustration here: in order to send contacts through Bluetooth, you have to go to Settings; Connections; Beam and enable the Receive all incoming beams setting to send contacts. It took me forever to figure this insanely obscure and poorly-named setting and realize that it was keeping me from sending contacts to the MINIKIT. This was almost a very different review, to no fault of the MINIKIT.)
The process of recording all of the necessary voice functions and sending the contact information is cumbersome at first, but once you get started it goes by pretty quickly. To make a long story short, you have to Bluetooth (is this a verb? I'm going for it) the contacts from your phone to the MINIKIT, and then record the name tag for the contact by saying the name of the person twice when prompted. Personally, I had never seen a setup like this. I have 2 other voice activated devices, and with one you actually have to read the numbers for each contact into the phone, which is horrible, and the other (the BlueAnt V1, discussed here) uses the speed dial settings in your phone to dial numbers. The MINIKIT contact setup is by far the best I have used, as when you send the contact via Bluetooth, all of the phone numbers associated with that contact are now in the MINIKIT’s memory. When you activate a contact, you are also given the option to designate which of the contact's numbers you want to dial (general, home, cellular or work). And yes, that is very cool.
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