Motorola IHF1000 Bluetooth Car Kit

Buying a new car is somehow out of the scope of this blog, but may be a good reason to talk about some automotive electronic gadgets. Actually I have changed a car recently, and the number of factory provided gadgets was not the most important factor of my decision. So it arrived quite stripped in terms of on board computers, audio - video systems and communication devices, as while they are nice, I do not consider them the most important aspect of automotive technology. But having said that I have to admit there are some gadgets that make me feel comfortable while driving, and a good handsfree phone system is one of them.

Because of my profession and my gadget drive, I change mobile phones quite often, so the only reasonable option is to have a Bluetooth handsfree kit installed, to avoid changing the main unit every time I change a phone. Bluetooth is very handy as well, as there is no need of taking the phone out of the pocket and is especially recommended to women, as they are able to keep phones in their handbags. It took me quite a while to narrow down the selection, as there is a galaxy of available devices on the market. My top priority was call quality and the first pick was the Parrot MK6000, because of the dual microphone system. It offered a few nice features as well, like A2DP music streaming. I was about to make a purchase, but following my recent rule of thumb, I browsed the Internet for user opinions on the product. To my surprise most MK6000 users have been unhappy. Not that it did not deliver the promised call quality, but because of it's buggy software implementation leading to unexpected freezes and requiring resets (stopping a car, turning the ignition off, waiting a while and turning the car on again, as the unit itself lacked a reset button). Lack of stability is the last thing I want from a new device. I am tired when a new, promised to be groundbreaking product delivers, but only occasionally... So I decided to look for something else, and based on user opinions, the new Motorola IHF1000 was worth considering.

The IHF1000 does not have dual microphones, but packs some good signal processing algorithms inside, as the resulting call quality is really good. I did my first test call to a friend of mine and the conversation was very smooth. At the end I asked him how it was at his side, ad he confirmed very good quality "because you are probably not driving now" (and I was actually driving at 60mph or 100 km/h). That first day I used only the basic call functionality and in the evening I went to read the manual (yes, there are still people like me reading manuals :) ... ). After the first section I jumped out of bed (it was already midnight) to test what I read. What I was not fully aware of was the voice control the IHF1000 offers. Yes, there are many products on the market offering voice commands, but actually the Motorola unit does not need any training - it implements full speaker independent ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), and does it in 5 languages. I tested only English, but there is no reason to be skeptical on the others. it works just flawlessly. Just talk. Like "Dial number +48 601 300 456" or "Contact list - add contact - Anna - +48 605 348 223" and then "Call Anna". I had 100% accuracy, which really impressed me.

Actually the IHF1000 is the first speaker independent voice recognition system I have used, that really works (despite my alien English accent). I wish I had a phone I could talk to in similar manner. May be it is time to switch to Motorola?