Monday, April 18, 2011

Versatile Smartphone Dock Offers Three Functions in One [REVIEW]



This odd apparatus purposes as a cell phone dock, a Bluetooth speaker, and a Bluetooth handset that permits your cell phone proceed like a landline phone. Here’s our review.

The Moshi Moshi04i Bluetooth Speaker-Handset by Native Union works with any Bluetooth-equipped wireless device. It has a silver-colored receiver, decorated with a honeycomb motif and assessing a twosome of inches longer than usual phone handsets.


That handset rests on its groundwork that furthermore purposes as a dock (that works especially well with iPhones). Once you location the handset on the dock, it feels associates that ascribe its battery. Likewise, when we closed our iPhones 4 into the dock, it ascribed that as well. Overall, this apparatus, conceived by UK-born Michael Young, examines absolutely initial, different any dock we’ve ever seen.


Let’s start out with what the 04i does best: It’s an very good iPhone dock and Bluetooth speaker. Once you’ve ascribed up the handset, it assists as a portable two of great-sounding speakers, capably playing anything audio your wireless apparatus feeds to it. Because of the two speakers’ diminutive dimensions, its bass answer isn’t going to rock the dwelling, but even when it’s on electric battery power (when it will only play at 75% of its greatest volume), it noise amazingly well.


It’s so straightforward to two up your Bluetooth apparatus with the 04i. With our iPhone, it acted on just like any other Bluetooth gadget, where you put the 04i into pairing mode, find it in the befitting iPhones list, and the two apparatus identify each other from then on. It can furthermore be paired with a Bluetooth-equipped laptop, and from there you can use the handset to converse on VoIP attachments such as Skype.


If you’re hearing to melodies from your iPhone on the speakers and a telephone call arrives in, it behaves correctly, fading down the melodies while you response the phone. Working like a landline telephone, when you choose up the handset from its cradle, you can start conversing without impelling any buttons.

Sound value as a phone handset is very good, but we did have a difficulty with each of the two cell phones with which we checked it: Although the calls rang out very good from the 04i, when conversing from the other end, we could discover aminor echo at the end of a voiced judgment or phrase. In some examples this was diverting, while in other situations it was subtle, but it was still there, and you might find it annoying. Strangely sufficient, that echoing attribute was not as obvious when we utilized it in speakerphone mode, which worked well.

Here’s the awful news: It’s cost at a vertical $200, a number that will likely give you sticker shock. But if you’re looking for a way to minimize your exposure to cellphone emission, and would like an odd cell phone dock that furthermore purposes as a pleasant-sounding Bluetooth speaker and devotes you a landline-like wireless handset, the Moshi Moshi04i might be worth a try.