One of the hot ticket items at CTIA 2010 this year was the Motorola Roadster Bluetooth In-car Speakerphone. I decided to check out if it lived up to its hype and surprisingly, the Motorola Roadster exceeded my expectations.
The Motorola Roadster Speakerphone was designed so you can clip it to your car’s visor, which is probably the best location for a speakerphone.
Here’s the highlights of the Motorola Roadster:
Bluetooth Pairing
The Motorola Roadster supports 2 simultaneous bluetooth connections (meaning both you and your wife can use it while in the car) and pair up to 8 devices.
SMS Text Messaging
The Motorola Roadster allows users to SMS text through voice and voice commands while driving, completely hands-free and it will even read out any text messages you receive.
Probably the most important feature of the Motorola Roadster is its ability to cancel out noise with the two microphones.
You will see in the hands-on review video below that the Motorola Roadster didn’t miss a single command/word at CTIA 2010 showfloor, where there were a “ton” of noise. (You can tell that even the noise-cancelling microphone I used with my DSLR camera picked up some noise.)
I know that when you are driving on the highway or have your car windows open, the noise gets pretty bad. (well, especially in my car because I like to drive fast and smoke)
Although all Android smartphones nowadays support voice SMS, you still have to touch a bunch of buttons, the Roadster eliminates that completely.
Now, the government will have to change the motto, “don’t text and drive” to “text hands-free and drive”.
FM Capability
The Motorola Roadster is also an FM transmitter that allows you to listen to your calls or even music (such as Last.fm or Pandora) on your car’s stereo. This is the sickest bluetooth speakerphone I have been looking for all my life. I listen to internet radio 24/7 on my desktop computer/laptop and my Android phones. I could buy an FM transmitter for my car but that would just make my car crowded with more stuff, the Roadster kills two birds with one stone.
I am certainly looking forward to this feature as I will be blasting internet radio while I drive from now on.
Battery Life and Charging
The Roadster gets about 20 hours of talk time plus it has an accelerometer which will detect when you get in the car and enter sleep mode to save battery when not in use.
The best part about the Roadster is that it can be re-charged via a microUSB charger, which I have anyways to charge my Android smartphones in my car. This keeps things simple as I can use my existing Motorola microUSB car charger (which is by the way the best microUSB car charger I have tried).
Flawless Integration with Android smartphones
If you own any Android smartphone with Android 2.2 Froyo, you will be able to take full advantage of everything that the Motorola Roadster offers with its free app MotoSpeak, available at the Market.
Also, it will work with Android 2.1 but you will be limited to only being able to read out SMS text messages.
The Motorola Roadster is available on Amazon and I will have further reviews after real-life testing.
Here’s an in-depth hands-on review video of the Motorola Roaster Bluetooth Speakerphone by Grant at Motorola. (Huge thanks to Grant, thanks for taking the time out to explain all the nitty, gritty details about the device!)
3 Responses to Motorola Roadster Bluetooth In-car Speakerphone Review! [Best Bluetooth Speakerphone 2010!]
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Zedo,
Under the paragraph “FM Capability” you say “This is the sickest bluetooth speakerphone…”. I’m sure you meant to say “slickest”.
Could you ease up on the ads in-between the article… I flew by it the first time thinking it was one of those total redirected ad pages.
Still, thanks for the review.
David
I’ve got a problem with this Roadster speakerphone, it won’t pair correctly to my Mytouch 3g slide android 2.1
Is anyone experience this?
I gave this product plenty of chances to impress, even exchanging the first one in the hopes that it was defective.
I used this product with my Droid2 and immediately found that the Droid had to have it’s bluetooth cycled off and on each time I got in the car to be able to play music through the stereo.
The FM transmitter is useless. It generates a lot of picket fencing, even when placed within a foot of the car’s antenna. On battery power the signal fades within a few minutes to be like trying to pick up a FM station 100 miles away with lots of static and the stereo locking and unlocking constantly. It does much better when the power cord is plugged in or you have a finger touching the unit (using them for antennas, I suspect) but neither of these solutions are feasible or practical.
Any music played sounds awful. The unit imparts a huge tremolo to any music played that will give you a headache within 5 minutes. It makes a expensive sound system sound like a $5 chinese boom box from Dollar General.
To make matters worse, the internal speaker isn’t loud enough to overcome normal road noise which makes the entire unit a $100 waste of money.
I tried the unit in 4 different vehicles (Mazda3, Mustang GT, Geo Prism, and Chevy Suburban) with no difference in behavior. I also tried it through my Bose wave radio in the house to verify the FM reception (or lack thereof).
It’s hard to believe that Motorola would release a product like this. I would certainly expect better of them.