MEX-BT2500 is Sony's latest offering when it comes to head-units with built-in bluetooth. Yup, you heard it right! Even car stereo head-units now come with bluetooth built-in!

What for you ask?

• The obvious one is connection to your bluetooth enabled mobile phone. Answer and redial numbers all from the buttons of the head-unit itself.
  
  
• If you've got an Mp3 player or bluetooth enabled audio device (such as a PDA or mobile phone or iPod with a bluetooth adaptor (purchaed from 3rd party vendors), you'll be able to stream music directly to the player with absolutely no hassle of dangling wires.
  

Features
At a pretty affordable price tag of RM 850, this gadget is souped up with pretty much anything you need in a car head-unit.

• Superb quality radio (I know coz I tried other brands such as Pioneer and it's nothing close to Sony's FM Tuner)
• CD Player
• MP3 CD Playback with Title, Artist & Album Info
• Bluetooth - enables audio streaming and handsfree calling from your mobile phone
• Removable face plate (pretty standard on most players nowadays)
• Remote control
• Equalizer (both custom and preset)
• 52W x 4 power output
• Subwoofer output
• and tonnes more features...

Since the main highlight of this product is it's bluetooth feature, I'll focus on how it fares...

Bluetooth review
Bluetooth is not exactly new in Car head-units. Some manufacturers already offer this feature - not so much as a built-in feature but an add-on. It'll cost somewhere between RM 600-700 for the bluetooth adaptor - HEFTY! As it's not a built-in component, you'll have wires dangling all over the car to fit the "mic" unit that comes with the bluetooth add-on.

The Sony MEX-BT2500 on hand has everything integrated. No wires as the mic is built-in.

Picking up calls, ending calls and rejecting calls comes from a push of a single button (the shiny silver button which also controls the volume)

Getting the phone to talk to the unit
It took me nothing more than 2 minutes to pair the phone to the head-unit. Hold one of the designated bluetooth buttons, search for a bluetooth device through your phone, select "Sony Explode", key in the password and VOILA! You're done!

Using bluetooth
With the phone and the head-unit talking to each other, an incoming call will pause the current CD you're playing or mute the radio and switch to bluetooth mode allowing you to either answer or reject the call by pushing the volume control knob. That's it! Pretty simple eh? Once you're done with the call, the unit resumes whatever it was playing before the call.

How is the call quality?
According to the people who spoke to me through my MEX-2500, most mentioned that it was clear and had no problems hearing me with the exception of the background noise that can be a little annoying - which I trust has something to do with my smart car's cabin. Engine noise is audible as it's right behind the driver's seat. Then again, Sony claims that unlike other manufacturers out there, Sony uses an omni-directional mic which is sensitive and it picks up sound from all angles - which is great during a call conference with everyone else in the car.

How about Audio Streaming?
As long as you've got an audio device that's bluetooth capable, the Sony MEX-2500 will recognize it. I tested this feature using my Nokia N95. After the initial pairing, all I had to do was to switch to "Bluetooth Audio" mode in the head-unit, hit the play music / video button on my Nokia and voila - music started streaming from my car speakers!

With so many good things I'm sure there are a couple of bads... RIGHT?
Okay, there are pros and cons to every product out there. There simply isn't a COMPLETE product. At least I haven't encountered one. The problem lies with making calls. From the Sony MEX-2500, all you can do is answer, reject calls or redial a number. To dial a number, you'll have to use your phone - but the moment you start dialing, the head-unit will automatically switch to bluetooth mode to handle your outgoing call.

The other thing that's missing on the unit is RDS (Radio Data Service). For example, if you're listening to your favourite radio station Fly FM :) - 95.8 in the Klang Valley, it wouldn't show the station name nor would it automatically tune to the next Fly FM frequency should you travel from one part of the country to the other.

So all in all, how do I rate this product?
For the price you pay, it's a FANTASIC product! The bluetooth feature is a BIG plus as now I can do away with my bluetooth handsfree. Just activate the bluetooth feature on the phone, enter the car, start the engine and voila! I'm all hooked up!

Picture of the day!
Originally uploaded by ben.jern {- blogged via mobile -}

Stella gets her weekly dose of gossip! It's gossip... Hardly ever true - as long as it keeps us happy :)

I'm at the PJ police station headquarters now. It's finally sunk in. Anyway, just to digress a lil'...

We've got LCD displays all over the place! Pretty high tech...

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. After returning home for a brief moment, i found out that not only did my car get broken into but also 3-4 other homes in my area had their cars broken into as well! This is becoming to sound like Oceans 11 - very well planned execution...

An a-hole broke into my car minutes ago...
Originally uploaded by ben.jern {- blogged via mobile -}

The loss, a Sony car head unit, my smart tag, an enclosure for my head unit and a damaged head unit area... What else? Not sure... Just work now.

Will keep you posted.

Now THAT was a holiday! My apologies for not being able to upload some shots while I was gallivanting around the country. It's all due to 1 thing - TECHNOLOGY. Sure its amazing when it works... but when it doesn't, it can be NASTY. I posted at least 3 times and it didn't work out... BUT no worries; I've gotten it all settled and the next time I need to do some mobile blogging, you'll see it here...

So what exactly happened? Where did I go? How was it? 1 word - SPECTACULAR.

It was a really well thought of holiday; executed down to the T will little surprises here and there. No, it's not like I recently struck a lottery or something, it's mostly thanks to contribution of certain individuals, a little bit of savings and some of the points I collected when using some cards - I managed to redeem quite a number of stays in a couple of hotels and made this trip a reality...

So here's how it went...

To kick it off like dessert in a 5 course meal, it was a night's stay at the Ritz Carlton Kuala Lumpur. Its like a jewel hidden in some corner in Kuala Lumpur which is kinda there but not kinda there. Service, as mentioned in tonnes of their advertisements - is impeccable. What they said about their butler service was true. Imagine this... at any point during our stay (our - meaning Stella & I), all we needed to do was point and push with one teeny weeny finger at that "magic" butler button and voila! out comes a butler (not in a genie style - just at the phone) awaiting to attend to your every need. Fruit juices? Coffee? Tea? There's no such thing as tea or coffee making facilities in the room - all you need is to push the "magic" button. So that was nice... and "Wake Up Calls" came with Tea + Coffee + Juice as an option... it was all complimentary :P



So after the check-in, it was my dinner, planned by Stella... at the Westin Kuala Lumpur... managed to get a free cake and a 50% discount for the entire meal (again using one of my many discount cards :)); but that's not the main thing - it was the food... oh GLORIOUS food... where? At the Latin restaurant called QBA - you read it as Que Bar. Very VERY VERY good food... dinner lasted a good 3 hours. No idea how but it just did. Most of the time was spent on chewing, swallowing, taking pictures and trying to blog using my mobile phone. Dinner ended with a tiramisu cake - compliments of the hotel and a dude who sang like how Pavarotti would sing Happy Birthday...



Next morning, it was a trip STRAIGHT to the land of Pangkor Laut - a privately owned resort by the YTL group. Located right next to the island of Pangkor and is home to one of the best Spa centres in the region! Of course, we had to drive to the jetty which was at Lumut and from there, a 50-minute boat ride to the 'island of paradise'.

Getting to the Lumut Jetty was quite an experience as :

1. We decided to stinge on CA$H
2. We wanted to try something new, instead of taking the highway...

So the "old road" we went. To be really honest, it wasn't that bad at all! We had almost ZERO toll to pay and sure we had a couple of HUMONGOUS trailers to overtake at certain points but overall, the view was great, the kampungs were a refreshing sight and seeing chickens, big lizards and cows crossing the road was exciting :) How? I don't know. Really I don't because I trusted my Garmin (the GPS I own) 100% of the time but it knew the routes and 3 1/2 hours later, we arrived at the Lumut Jetty.



First came the welcome drink then the escort to the jetty and ferried over to the beautiful resort island of Pangkor Laut...



What happens in Pangkor Laut... STAYS in Pangkor Laut so I'm not going to blog too much about it here :) Just that I was bitten by gazillions of sand flies leaving me with nasty polka dots all over - one at a very intimate area called the 'belly button'. :)



A couple of days into our stay (just a couple of days before our stay ended in Pangkor Laut) we decided to hook up another stop-over... food came to mind and Penang... HERE WE COME!



So after Pangkor Laut, we returned to the jetty, picked up my ride and drove once again via the "old roads" (to save $$$) towards the Penang bridge. It took a good 2 1/2 hours through the little towns and kampungs... and then HELLO the land of food, char kuey teow with huge mutated prawns...



Where did I stay? The latest hotel in Penang called the "G Hotel" which is located right next to Gurney Plaza. Only sad thing, I couldn't get tad bit of discount... everything was full-fare... but the hotel was so new and 'artsy' that we had to try it... @ 240++ we thought since we saved so much during the trip using all the points redemption and discount cards; why not?

... a day later ...

Returned to KL and went feasting again! Compliments of my parents, we went to this Korean BBQ restaurant for dinner - it was a lil' pricey but GOOD and a tad bit smoky...



If I were to document everything I went through during this unforgettable one week, it'll probably take a whole month to finish typing it all... so I'm gonna leave with you with some pics taken during the trip...

Yes, it's my birthday and usually, it's celebrated with great valour (did i use that word correctly? - nevermind). It's a time where many things will be planned and often times my beloved and i will be on a one week journey to some land...

As a matter of fact, i'm writing this entry from that land... The first day of the many journeys to come.

Will keep you posted while this journey continues... Oh btw, i'm trying this mobile blogging for the first time - hopefully, this entry goes through along with an attached pic of whats happening now!

Time to savour my b'day meal! More later... :)

If you don't know by now, yes, I bought myself a Nokia N95 to replace my faithful Dopod 838Pro. Why you ask? Well, if you read my last post, it was mainly due to stress... I had a destress and I've found my remedy - buy gadgets - expensive therapy BUT it came at the right time and I've been eyeing it for sometime now so when the time came I just bought it.

Why the N95 though? For starts, it's been a long time since I've used a Nokia and secondly, it has a host of features from GPS, a 5 megapixel camera, 3G, HSDPA (a.k.a 3.5G), WiFi, a fantastic screen, tonnes of apps and a solid interface... I'll talk about the other features as my escapades continue with this little wonder but first...

BEHOLD... pictures taken using a Nokia N95 - pictures are not altered in any way...


Girl Girl my dog...

Steve (my colleague), Stella and myself at his recent wedding

A close-up (macro) shot of the spoon I used to savour my Mud Pie @ American Chilis

Me acting wierd...

More on the N95 as the escapades continue!

Okay, I admit it, anything cheap and good is my cup-of-tea :)

Here's how you cook it...

Ingredients required :

• A computer
• A Webcam (any webcam will do) + Mic (If your computer doesn't have a mic)
• An Internet Connection
• Skype (downloadable for free from www.skype.com)

That's it!

Once you've got all of the above ingredients, put it together and sign-up for a FREE skype account. In fact, you'll need 2 accounts.

Skype Account 1

For the computer you'll be monitoring (the home computer)

Skype Account 2
For the computer in the office or notebook or wherever you want to monitor your home from

Just a couple steps and you're ready to get going!

Get the latest version of Skype installed in the home computer, sign-in with your Skype Account 1, click "Add" under contacts, key in Skype Account 2's username and click OK.

Next, click Tools -> Options and configure as shown in the 3 pictures below :

All you need now is to go to the computer where you'll be monitoring your home from, do a normal installation of Skype and sign in using Skype Account 2, click "Add" under contacts, key in Skype Account 1 and voila! You're done!

To call and start monitoring, just call Skype Account 1 and the computer will answer the call automatically, letting you listen in on the surroundings of the computer plus LIVE video feed of what's happening.

Sweet or What?

I discovered something about me lately. Some people destress by eating chocolates or anything sweet. Some go cooking, watch a movie, buy new clothes... you get the idea...

Me? I buy toys... I'm not much of a clothes buyer - sure the occasional one or two but whenever I get stressed I pickup toys! I'm not talking about the fluffy ones but those with electrical diodes soldered onto a board and comes complemented with tonnes of buttons - in short, gadgets.

I always thought it was just one of my crazes but this is official, whenever I'm stressed out, I buy gadgets! Just the other day, I was feeling a little stressed out due to many things and I was on the lookout for a cure... a movie? nah... something to eat? nah... but the moment I picked up something I've been eyeing for sometime now, immediately, I felt light - it was surreal... a sudden rush of cold air and I was STRESS free... :)

The question is what did I buy?

Behold... my new toy that got me destressed :P

Let's hope I don't get stressed up anytime soon man... my therapy is COSTLY!