Parrot Evolution Bluetooth Car Kit
Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at
12:23 am
Product Description
It takes less than an hour to mount the Parrot CK3000 EVOLUTION : electronic box, microphone, keypad. There are no apparent wires. Once installed, just turn on the engine and you are immediately connected to your phone. Even by leaving the mobile phone in his bag, with his Parrot CK3000 EVOLUTION, the driver dictates a name and is immediately connected to his correspondent. The car’s speakers transmit the conversation with perfect quality of sound, regardless of the driving conditions (traffic, highway¿).
Features:
- Voice recognition dialer
- Uses the car speakers
- Easy to install and to use
- Discreet and elegant design
- Multi-user, pairing up to three phones
Price: Too low to display
Parrot Evolution Bluetooth Car Kit
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Tagged with: Bluetooth • Evolution • Parrot
Filed under: Accessories
I had Best Buy install the Parrot CK3000 Evolution with the Multicomm in my daughter’s car. She thinks part of driving is talking on the phone. One hand was always holding her phone to her ear while driving. She needed a good hands-free unit to make the road safer for others.
At low speeds, it worked great. It also worked great for me at high speed. The callers could hardly tell I was on a hands-free unit even at high speeds in a small (noisy) car.
But when my daughter used it at high speeds, people would tell her she was very hard to understand. There seemed to be a scratching static of her higher voice when the road noise increased. I theorize that the Parrot noise cancelation was canceling out too much of her voice when road noise increased.
I added a 10 ohm resistor (from Radio Shack) in the microphone wire. This did the trick. The extra resistance lowered the sensitivity in the microphone resulting in less pick-up of road noise but still great pick-up of her voice. Lowering the sensitivity resulted in less need for the noise cancelation to work so hard. It still cancels most road noise, but does not lower the quality of her voice. You almost can’t tell she is on a speaker phone. With the adjustment, this becomes an amazing product.
For the most part the Parrot CK3000 works. I bought a special harness to connect it to my steering wheel controls and that works fine. However, for some reason I will have random trouble with the bluetooth giving a spotty connection. I’ll have full bars on the phone but a poor transfer of voice data back and forth, with the sound dropping out. So I believe it’s the bluetooth and not the phone signal.
Also, for a car unit, I would have figured that ambient noise and the voices coming through the stereo would have been taken into effect. The unit goes through the stereo and when I’m on quiet roads, it works well enough but my friends complain about noise. On a loud road, I have to turn the stereo up enough that it does a feedback loop of sorts. While my friends can hear me, when they try to speak it’s terrible for them cause they hear themselves coming back through the microphone.
So if I’m on the highway, I’m not sure how useful this product ends up being.
Also, the website has a firmware upgrade sytem for the product, but you have to buy a separate cable and hook it to your computer to load them. The cable should come with the unit so a person can upgrade the second they buy the unit. Why is this so important? Well, once you have it installed in the car, nobody is going to take their car apart again just to reflash the Parrot CK3000 so an upgrade is only useful before you install.
On quiet roads though, I am able to have a conversation and it’s nice.
I drive a VW GTI 2007.
This thing works fairly well at speeds of 30 mph or less, but if I drive faster than that the people on the other end really start to complain about not being able to hear me. I’ve moved the microphone in all different places without much luck. It is currently about 15 inches from my mouth attached to the overhead center console (away from the windshield). But it just doesn’t filter out the background noise very well. On the other hand, some people claim theirs works just fine so it could just vary based on your car (mine is a pretty quiet car, though) or it could just be that I got a somewhat faulty unit. My wife’s car has a handsfree unit built-in to her Acura and it works quite a bit better than the Parrot one I have.
Just works, not much more to say about it. I use it in a BMW 3 series with a connects2 cable, so that I can use the steering wheel controls to answer my phone, hang up, use voice commands etc.
We bought this for our father and he loves it. Very user friendly. Needs professonal instaler. This is used in a lot of company vehicles as a way for hands FREE!. Enjoy.