Go hands free with the fantastic new BlackBerry Visor Mount Speakerphone VM-605

 

Everyone knows it’s dangerous to drive while holding a mobile phone to your ear and in a growing number of localities it’s even illegal. Bluetooth headsets can be a bit inconvenient and uncomfortable (not to mention unattractive to wear) for some people so they just go back to throwing caution to the wind and holding their phone to their ear. Today we look at a great solution to the problem, the BlackBerry Visor Mount Speakerphone VM-605. While the device works great with BlackBerry devices, it should work with most recent Bluetooth enabled devices. We also tested it with an iPhone 3G S and it worked great with that device too.

The VM-605 is a very sleek attractive device; it’s quite compact and weighs about 3 ounces. It’s a little less than 5” long and about 2 ¼” wide at the widest point. It comes equipped with a wire visor mount.

This unit is simple to use yet packed with features:

• Stand alone Bluetooth speaker
• Up to13 hours of talk time
• Built in FM transmitter
• Advanced noise reduction technology
• Works on phone calls, plays music, compatible with GPS applications
• Extremely easy to use

Sleekly designed, there aren’t a whole lot of buttons or controls necessary to learn. The front of the unit is essentially one big button that controls many functions. There is an FM button on one side and a volume up/down rocker switch on the other, that’s it.

Here’s how it works:

Charging
The unit comes with a car charger or you can use your current MicroUSB BlackBerry charger to charge the internal battery. Charging a depleted battery takes about 2 hours. Charging the device in your car while it is attached to your visor is a bit awkward due to the coiled charger cable and we’d recommend removing it from the visor to charge.

Pairing
Pairing is a simple process, you just hold down the main button for ten seconds until the voice says pairing, you then put your phone in discovery mode. Very quickly the two devices will connect with each other. This was a quick and simple process with both the BlackBerry Tour and Apple iPhone 3G S we tested it with.

 

FM Transmitter
The built in FM transmitter is simple to set up by pressing the FM button and tuning your FM radio to the station the voice announces. If that station is occupied or doesn’t sound clear, hold the volume up key until the voice announces a new FM station, tune to that one to try again. Using the FM transmitter allows you to listen to music from your phone, GPS voice directions (if you have a supported application on your phone), or phone calls through your car’s stereo speakers. We’ve never been crazy about the quality of FM transmitters in urban areas with crowded FM bands but this one works as well as or better than any we’ve ever tried. The biggest gripe we have with the FM transmitter is that after one minute of not being used it becomes inactivated, this makes this feature difficult or impossible to use for incoming calls.

Caller ID
The VM-605 announces the phone number of callers, which is quite handy. We’d recommend putting the phone in vibrate mode so the ringer doesn’t sound at the same time the voice is announcing the phone number of the incoming call. We’d love to see the system announce the name of the person that’s calling if they are in your phonebook. Maybe this could be a feature enhancement for the next version of the product?

Observations
This is the best car speakerphone we have ever used. During testing we were told that it sounded like we were on a landline. The internal speaker quality was very clear and there was sufficient volume to hear quite easily even mounted on the car visor.

Conclusions
We prefer this device to any Bluetooth speaker or headset we have used to date. Using the BlackBerry VM-605 is a great way to drive hands-free and we highly recommend it. The MSRP is $99.99 but you can probably find it discounted from the usual retail and online sources. It is well worth the asking price as it is sleek, well thought out and it works great.