Parrot Rhythm N'Blue car radio any good?

Barak · 8 Jan 2006 at 15:59

Getting a new car this week (V6 Alfa 156) and have been looking around for a decent CD player to put in it. This Parrot bluetooth stereo looks pretty damn nifty but it's also quite new, so I can't find any reviews on it.

Has anyone seen/tried one or know of somewhere with a proper review of one?
Cheers

Barak · 9 Jan 2006 at 13:02

What kinds of compatibility problems Gav? They seem to have good documentation on support for various phones (including my O2 XDA mini), so do you mean the claimed compatibility is crap, or just the range of compatibility?

Barak · 9 Jan 2006 at 19:46

Think it may be worth a try for how much cheaper it is than the comparable offering from Pioneer (which doesn't seem to support any of the XDAs anyway).

Who else does bluetooth units? I think H&B do one, will have to have a search.

Thanks again for the help btw.

Barak · 30 Jan 2006 at 19:36

Though I might as well follow up on this.

I ended up buying the Pioneer DEH-P70BT (it does support the O2 XDA II mini, named as the QTek S100 - same thing). The Pioneer is great so far and works really well with the phone, bar a couple of small niggles that I haven't had time to sort out yet:

Transferring contacts to the unit is very hit and miss. The phone seems to send the contacts out much faster than the HU can receive them and so you rarely get more than ~ 50% of the contacts actually transferred across. Haven't got round to looking for a fix for this yet, but I'd imagine it is fixable.
Putting my phone in a cradle that's stuck to the windscreen, there isn't a line of sight to the HU and so the connection quality for hands free isn't so good - people have commented it's very quiet on their end. When the phone's on the seat or in my pocket, reception seems great.
The screen on the unit inverts its colour every few minutes (from black background, blue text/anim to blue background, black text/anim). When inverted, the display is quite bright and can be a distraction. Haven't found a way to stop it doing this yet.

Other than the above, it's great