New on the shelves
FIRST TEST
In-car digital assistant could save you penalty points
“The basic turn-by-turn graphics are not good enough in a device that costs as much as this”
Price: £299 Rating: ★★★★★ Contact: www.amazon.co.uk
DISTRACTED driving can kill, while using your phone behind the wheel can land you with six penalty points and a £200 fine. So something like Chris, which is designed to prevent both, is a good idea.
Combining satellite navigation, Bluetooth phone hook-up and an audio player, Chris links with an app on your Android handset (Apple compatibility is due late summer), and allows you to control features that many motorists require, while keeping your phone safely in a glovebox or pocket.
It’s a sleek, good-looking unit that will respond to both voice and gesture control. You can ask it to navigate to a destination, dictate a text or WhatsApp message, play music or make a call. You can also use gestures to turn down the volume, skip tracks, and other functions. Both the voice recognition and gesture controls work well.
That’s where the good news ends, however. Although the HERE-based satellitenavigation directions were decent, the route was slow to load, and the basic turn-by-turn graphics were not good enough in a device that costs as much as this.
You can also forget about linking Chris to your car’s stereo via Bluetooth; it can’t do that at the same time as connecting to your phone. To make matters worse, there’s also no access to streaming services.
Given this unit’s price and how good Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant are, you would be better off forgetting Chris, putting your phone in a cradle, and using its own voice-recognition software.