Belkin F4U037 Car Bluetooth Music Receiver - Equipment Review
This is my first equipment review. While most JRT Studio customers may not know this, I spend an awful lot of money on tablets, phones, phablets, bluetooth headsets, wired headsets, wired headsets with buttons, and pretty much anything else I think my customers should expect my apps to work well with. Why keep all this good information to myself? I'm going to try and write regular blog entries about our equipment in hopes it helps someone else out.
First up is a Belkin Bluetooth Car Recieiver that I bought. This product is pretty simple. It has a male mic end and a 12V cigarette lighter for power and a little Bluetooth receiver. Just plug the mic into an audio in jack on your car and plug in the 12V for power. When the car is on, the Bluetooth receiver lights up and you can connect your Android device to it. At least that is how it is supposed to work.
The goal of this product was to allow me to start my car and have my Android phone automatically connect over Bluetooth and then use my begin play connect feature in Rocket Player to start the music automatically. That way, I turn on my car and music just starts streaming. I turn off the car and music just stops streaming. Sounds like a great way for me to eat my own dog food and create a commercial free radio station that only plays music I like. :-)
The Skinny
This Belkin product is pretty cool. For $45, it did 90% of what I would expect. It was easy to connect to with my device. It sounds pretty darn good to me (for Bluetooth). Overall, I would be a pretty happy customer, except.... the device does not broadcast it is available when it first turns on. Since it does not tell the phone (oh, I tried six phones and three cars), "Hey phone, I'm available, connect to me!", the phone does not automatically connect. That means everytime I get in the car I have to unlock my phone, go to "Settings->Bluetooth->Connect to Belkin". To be honest, that is more work than just plugging the phone into a mic cable. In the end, I have to give this product a thumbs down, as it just doesn't implement Bluetooth correctly.