Car Head Units have gone a long way - Sony MEX-BT2500

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!