How to Sync your contacts to your car kit

More and more Bluetooth Car kits now support phone book synchronisation – this is where all the phone numbers stored on your phone are copied to the car kit. It’s a handy feature to have, although the benefits may not be all that obvious.

By having your numbers stored on the car kit, it means that kits that support Caller ID can show you the name of the person calling instead of just the number – what’s more, if your car kit supports TTS (Text to Speech) it can also call out the name of the person that’s calling you.

Another great benefit of having a car kit with phone book sync is that some of them will support voice dialling. Now you’re right for thinking that a lot of phones already support voice dialling, and you’re right, but what I mean here is that the car kit itself handles the voice dialling rather than your phone.

On a standard Bluetooth Car Kit, when you activate voice dialling, you press a button on the kit that then puts your phone into listening mode. Your phone then tries to match what you’ve said against either a pre-recorded voice tag or automatically match it to a name in your phonebook – often getting it wrong as the increased wind & road noise can distort what you say.

With some car kits that with phonebook sync and voice dialling, it’s the car kit that listens to your voice and matches it to a name or number stored in it and it then tells your phone to dial that number. As the car kit is optimised to reduce wind and road noise, you get a more reliable match and less mis-dialled numbers. The great news with this though is that your phone doesn’t have to support voice dialling in order for this to work and it even works on the iPhone.

Syncing your contacts

Without getting too technical, there are two ways that your contacts can be transferred to your car kit – each using a  different Bluetooth profile. Profiles are predefined ways in which two Bluetooth devices talk to each other. One method uses the OPP (object push profile), the other is the PBAP (phonebook access profile). Which one you use depends on your phone and car kit.

OPP (object push profile) is used to receive contacts that are ‘pushed’ to it from a phone. Syncing your contacts to a car kit that uses the OPP profile needs to be done manually and normally involves putting the car kit into ‘receiving mode’ and sending your contacts over one by one or, if your phone supports it, all in one go. To update a contact you’ll need to delete the entry from the car kit and then send the updated contact to the car kit.

PBAP (phonebook access profile) works very differently. Rather than you having to send your contacts to it, the kit connects to the phone and retrieves the contacts from it automatically. Any changes that you make to a contact will be transferred to the car kit the next time your phone is connected. Depending on your phone, you can normally specify which contacts and call logs are synchronised with your kit too.

Of the two, PBAP is the easiest way to sync your contacts, but as the PBAP is a newer Bluetooth Profile some older car kits and phones don’t support it.

Compatibility

In order for you to be able to sync your contacts both your phone and car kit will need to support the same Bluetooth Profile. If you have a phone that only supports the PBAP such as the iPhone 3G, and a car kit that only supports OPP you’re going to have problems. The iPhone will be waiting for the car kit to read the contacts, and the car kit will be waiting for the phone to send the contacts over. Eventually both devices will time out and no contacts will be transferred. If you’ve got this type of kit, you’ll still be able to use the kit for calls and last number redial, but that’s all.

Parrot Kits

From personal experience, I’ve found that Parrot out-perform every other car kit manufacturer when it comes to phone book synchronisation and the additional features that come with it, so if you’re after a kit that will sync easily and give you all the extra features that I mentioned above then take a look at the ones listed below.

Simple Car Kits

Parrot make a couple of simple car kits, but they’re actually both the same – they just look a little bit different. The Parrot Minikit Slim and Minikit Chic are both slim, portable car kits that can pair with up to 5 phones. They support both the OPP and PBAP profiles, so you shouldn’t have a problem in synchronising your phone book with them. The Parrot Minikit Slim/Chic can store up to 1000 contacts per phone (maximum of 2500 for all phones) and has text to speech synthesis to read out the callers name when you receive a call. Unlike most kits, the Minikit Slim/Chic doesn’t have a speaker, instead it has a vibrating panel for improved audio.

Fitted Car Kits

The fitted car kits from Parrot are just as good as the portable ones, if not better. As they’re wired into your car, you get much better audio quality as they route the call audio through your existing car stereo speakers as standard, not only that but they are also designed to work really well with the music player on your phone or a stand alone MP3 player or iPod. Each kit has support for streaming your music in stereo over Bluetooth as well as a dock connector for iPhones and iPods, a 3.5mm line in cable and a USB port for flash memory MP3 players. The current range is based around one model with a few noticeable differences between each of the kits.

The Parrot MKi9000 is the kit that the next two models are based on. The kit is fitted completely out of sight behind your dashboard and is operated through a small remote (shown above) that can be attached to your dashboard or steering wheel. The MKi range of kits all support both the OPP and PBAP profiles for maximum compatibility with handsets. If your phone supports PBAP, the first time you pair your phone, your entire phone book will be transferred over to the kit. Everytime you connect your phone, the car kit will then check for any updates and download them automatically. The kit also features phone independent voice dialling, so to make a call, press the green button and say the name of the person you want to call. If you have multiple numbers for a contact, you’ll be asked by the kit whether you want to call them at home, on their mobile at work etc. As there is no screen on the MKi9000, all the menus are voice-driven and the car kit will talk back to you as you scroll through them. If you don’t want to use voice dialling, or aren’t sure what a contact is saved as, you can manually scroll through the phonebook using the remote control, with the kit reading out the names of your contacts as you go through. The MKi9000 is better suited to touch screen or large screen handsets as the kit itself has no display.

The Parrot MKi9100 is exactly the same kit as the MKi9000, but with the addition of a 2 line OLED screen it means you can keep your phone out of sight and still access some of the menu’s on it. The MKi9100 supports OPP and PBAP so your contacts will synchronise in the same way, but by having a screen it means that you can scroll through them visually, rather than have to listen to the car kit read them out to you.

The last one in the range is the Parrot MKi9200. Again its the same basic kit as the MKi9000 but with a 2.4″ colour screen. The bigger screen obviously makes it easier to scroll through your phone book, but it can also show you album art and detailed information on the song that is currently being played from your phone or iPod. On the back of the screen there is an SDHC memory card reader that can handle cards upto 32GB in size – so depending on how much music you own, you could carry your entire music library with you all the time. The screen is detachable and can be removed easily.

There are other car kits that support phone book synchronisation – I’ve listed a few below, but these don’t have all the extra features that the Parrot ones do – and the voice dialling features are all phone dependent.

• Advanced Bluetooth Visor Car Kit – Supports OPP only
• Movon MK20 – Supports OPP only
• Supertooth Visor Voice – Supports PBAP
• Sony Ericsson HCB-150 – Supports PBAP