Chinwag at wheel without distraction
Bluetooth cancels noise, and boom mic makes you more clearly heard
Supreme cups cancel noise: There’s a reason drivers risk stiff penalties to surreptitiously use their cellphones while on the road. Bluetooth solutions offer a good audio experience, but not a great audio experience. Jamming the phone against one’s ear still provides better sound quality than most available Bluetooth options. Jabra’s new Supreme Bluetooth headset tilts the balance, replacing the traditional earbud with a full ear cup, which combines with active noise cancellation to provide a vast improvement in removing ambient car noise from the phone call. The result is a clear audio experience. Phone calls received via Supreme sound better than having the phone jammed up against your ear. Throw into the mix a boom microphone for better voice transmission, a smartphone app that will customize settings and voice control — not to mention six hours of talk time and 15 hours of standby time —and Jabra may cost Canada’s road enforcement community countless future fines. In-car phone calls that are not only hands free, but free of ambient car noise ... Bluetooth
holdouts have no further excuses. $100; visit jabra.com
Pioneer wants to spin your
tunes: Not content to manufacture some of the best car stereos around, Pioneer Electronics now dabbles in song selection with MIXTRAX — a new application that will be implemented into its 2012 stereo lineup — and is now available for download. The software analyzes songs in your library, finding similar beats and melodies to recommend a playlist according to song similarity. Competitor Sony has a similar playlist generator built into its stereos, but MIXTRAX goes farther by actually mixing the songs together into one continuous tune via a user-selected mixing style or by MIXTRAX’S automatic selection. It’s as though the product development geeks at Pioneer have dropped their white coats and let loose on the dance floor. Now, instead of your 1,000 MP3S being played randomly or chronologically, MIXTRAX will create a song order that’s intuitive and can play all songs continuously with no breaks if so desired. Pioneer lets consumers try the app before they buy via download to an IOS device or to their PC, which suggests that it knows it’s on to something. Free, or $1.99 for premium IOS app; visit mixtrax-global.com