A guide to the best Professionally Installed Car Kits
Monday, September 7th, 2009
If you spend a reasonable amount of time in the car use your phone for calls, listening to music or for GPS Navigation while you’re driving, then a hands free car kit is essential. Over recent years, the number of ‘self install’ or ‘plug and play’ car kits available has increased considerably, but while they may be a great low cost, portable solution, they can’t compete with the audio quality, ease of use and reliability of a fully installed car kit that is integrated with your vehicle.
In the earlier days of mobile phones, the King of the Car Kits was the Nokia CARK-91, almost every fleet car had one fitted but then along came Bluetooth, changing Car Kits forever. You no longer needed bulky cradles or holders attached to your dashboards, external aerials and speakers became unnecessary and car kits started to get smarter.
Modern Bluetooth car kits can do much more than just play your calls through a speaker. Car kits can now route audio from your calls through your car stereo without the need for adapters or extra cables, play music from your phone through the stereo, store your phonebook, add voice dialling capabilities, connect to MP3 players and Sat Nav units and much more. Bluetooth car kits are more flexible too, they work with any make of handset, where as older car kits with cradles generally only work with just one manufacturer – THB car kits being the only exception to this.
To help make choosing the right professionally installed car kit a bit easier for you, I’ve been through our range of car kits and listed 5 of the best below.
The Nokia CK-300 is a mid-range Bluetooth car kit from Nokia and with the right phone can be a very powerful accessory. All you see on your dashboard is a small remote control that has a rotating dial and 4 well spaced buttons which make it extremely easy to use. The CK-300 is designed to work best with Nokia S60 handsets (N-Series and E-Series). On it’s own, it can connect to your phone to answer and end calls, stream music in stereo over bluetooth and can also be connected to any music player that has a 3.5mm headphone socket.
Nokia CK-300 Bluetooth Car Kit
To really make the most of the kit though, you can download and install the Nokia Car Menu Application which will then make your phone an integral part of the car kit. You can use the remote control on the car kit to access pretty most of the main applications on your phone, including the phone book, email inbox, music library, Nokia Maps, call logs and settings. If your phone supports it, you can then get the car kit to read out text messages and emails while you’re driving using text to speech technology.
Installation of the car kit has been improved too. It no longer needs to be wired into the ignition of your car as a built in motion sensor will turn the kit on when the car is moving. It’s a neater installation too as there is no external speaker on the CK-300 – it connects directly to the back of your car stereo and plays all audio through your existing speakers (Non ISO car stereos may require an extra cable). Nokia handsets with a 2mm charging port can be charged from the car kit as it has a 2mm charging cable, other handsets will need a separate car charger. If you want to know more about the CK-300 I covered this kit in detail on my post a couple of weeks ago when I wrote my guide to Nokia Car Kits.
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