Parrot MINICar Kit SLIM UK Bluetooth Car Kit
Product Description
The Parrot MINIKIT SLIM is a portable Bluetooth hands free kit sporting a profiled sleek design. Thanks to its space saving design it offers countless uses in the car in the office and at home. Its highly intuitive interface will automatically connect to your Bluetooth phone when nearby. Fixed to the sun visor or laid on a table it adapts to every environment and can easily be carried around in your pocket.
Technical specifications:
3 buttons including 1 rotary button 2 LEDs green LED and red LED.
Green button answer call a contact from the phonebook.
start voice recognition.
confirm dual call private mode.
Red button hang up switch on off exit the menus cancel.
Rotary button access the menus adjust the volume send DTMF signals.
Full duplex.
Built in omnidirectional microphone
Audio output via thevibrating panel.
Advanced Parrot NR3 noise reduction.
AEC 2 echo cancellation.
Voice menus for all menus.
Multi speaker voice recognition.
Text To Speech speech synthesis of the names in the phonebook.
Voiceprints up to 150 per phone Number of contacts.
1 000 per phone total of 2 500 Language one language per version.
Pairing up to five devices.
Battery lithium ion maximum charging time of 4 hours.
Battery life over 15 hours.
talk time over 20 days on standby.
Automatic connection by pairing order.
- The Parrot MINIKIT SLIM is a portable Bluetooth hands-free kit sporting a profiled, sleek design. Thanks to its space-saving design, it offers countless uses: in the car, in the office and at home. Its highly intuitive interface will automatically connect to your Bluetooth phone when nearby. Fixed to the sun visor or laid on a table, it adapts to every environment and can easily be carried around in your pocket.
- Once paired, the Parrot MINIKIT SLIM automatically synchronises its phonebook with the contacts on your mobile phone. The phonebook on the MINIKIT SLIM is updated seamlessly whenever it connects. The entire phonebook is available at all times thanks to the voice synthesis of the names (Text-To-Speech function). Practical and indispensable.
- Fancy calling one of the contacts in the phonebook? Say the name and the MINIKIT SLIM recognises it without any prior training and dials the number. If several numbers are associated with the same person, tell the kit which one you want to dial by saying mobile, work, home, and so on. You can also record a voiceprint (shortcut) for one of your contacts, so that you can call them even more quickly.
- Parrot has combined its audio expertise with the vibrating panel technology. No more speakers – the top panel is connected to the audio circuit and vibrates to reproduce natural, open sound. The results are spectacular – stunning sound quality, crystal-clear conversations and power always ready to go. The especially discreet high sensitivity microphone is fully built into the design.
After initailly recieving my first unit, i had to return it, as it locked up on a regular basis. When i recieve my replacement unit, it paired and synchronised my phone book as per the instructions.
I have used the unit now for a number of weeks and am pleased with its performance, the sound is reasonably good and battery life excellent.
One slightly annoying issue is the “Voice recognition” engine, it sometimes struggles with my northern dialect and i find myself having to speak in a more electro-synthetic style to get the unit to recognise the tag.
Then i hear you say “You can record your own Voice tags”.
According to the instructions and parrot’s web site you can.
But i have had two of these units and neither came with Voice Tagging in the menu, so i beleive this to be a Quality Check issue in the UK 1.03V Software version.
If i’m correct the previous MiniKit version, also had an upgrade option in it’s menu, mine does not.
I contacted Parrot support helpdesk about the missing Voice Tag menu and the upgrade option, they replied, saying it would appear in the software update. My concern is that i won’t be able to update even with Parrots update software, because i dont have the option to put it in to upgrade mode.
I’m still rating this with 4 Stars even with the missing feature sets.
Rating: 4 / 5
This product is light,compact and the best part is that it is fully portable. It can be paired with up to 5 mobiles so the whole family can share it. It’s speaker is excellent, very clear and surprisingly loud for such a compact item. Being able to transfer your contact list from your phone to the Minikit is excellent. OK, I agree that using voice activated calling, it sometimes gets its wrong, but most of the time it works well. I believe it is state of the art in this area. All in all, a great product with good battery life and much better than having a slug stuck on your ear! Buy it!
Rating: 5 / 5
If you’ve been used to a built-in system, as I had been in my Nissan (also a Parrot system), then this is something of a disappointment. I find it clumsy to operate and having it attached to the sun-visor doesn’t help when you want to answer or place a call whilst on the move. Muting/pausing/switching off your stereo, then reaching up and trying to find the right button to answer a call by feel, whilst keeping your eyes on the road, isn’t really a very safe manoeuvre. It would be much better if you could answer a call by saying “Answer”.
On the plus side, the speaker is surprisingly good, although my car is pretty quiet. If you have a sports car, or convertible, I would think this unit would be hard to hear. Apparently, the call quality at the other end is very good (according to my wife). I have found it impossible to update the firmware with Parrot’s software application – it just freezes whilst flashing. Maybe because I am using Vista. I have asked Parrot technical support for help (they are generally pretty good – I have had Parrot units before and they were very helpful). Pairing with my iPhone was a little cumbersome I have to say, and I haven’t managed yet to pair with my wife’s N95 – it just won’t do it. It automatically picked up the address book from the iPhone and so far, voice dialling seems to work OK, at least for the contact name – oddly, I have had to repeat “Home” or “Cellphone” many times to get it to recognise that. However, if you have contacts with foreign names, I think it’s going to struggle.
Ultimately, I think I’m going to buy a Parrot MKI9200 and wire it in. I generally believe that Parrot is the best Bluetooth car-phone system, and this unit is probably good value for money at its price point, but I just wish I’d gone the whole hog from the start.
Rating: 3 / 5
The car I recently bought didn’t have factory fitted bluetooth, so I’d been on the lookout for a decent system. I don’t like bluetooth earpieces, and I didn’t want my car hacked apart in order to get a traditional car kit fitted. Bought one of these, and I’m really impressed. It clips snugly onto the sunvisor, and hasn’t moved an inch yet. Call quality is excellent – it uses ambient noise cancelling technology, and also has echo-cancelling built-in, which prevents the situation when you can hear your own voice echoed back during the call. The internal speaker is plenty loud enough to be able to comfortable have a conversation, even at motorway speeds.
It’s a simple device to use – just has 2 buttons (Red = reject call, Green = answer call) and a rotary dial for selecting options like phonebook, settings etc. Initially, voice recognition seemed a bit hit and miss. However, a recent firmware update has provided a new menu option to allow you to record your own voice tags against the numbers in your phonebook (which, incidentally, is automatically copied from the phone when you first connect via bluetooth). This now means that the voice recognition works really well.
My only criticisms are minor ones: there’s no case or sleeve provided for the unit, which seeing it’s designed to be removed from the car and used around the house (according to the instructions), seems a bit stingy. Also, the unit charges via the included car-charger or via mini-USB lead – there’s no mains adaptor. The cable on the car-charger is too short to reach the unit when it’s on my sunvisor, so it’s USB charging only for me. However, this is only a minor niggle.
All in all, an excellent bit of kit.
Rating: 5 / 5
Please read this prior to ordering
I have purchased this Parrot Minikit Slim hands free mobile phone unit from a well known TV shopping channel. The first impression once opening it was wow!
It is small and compact, yet the volume and sound quality are excellent.
I have a LG Chocolate with Bluetooth which is the minimum requirement to enable this unit to work, however that’s were it went down hill from here, Yes it has Bluetooth but and that’s a BIG but, it does not support auto sync which is very important as the unit tries to sync with the unit and as the phone is not responding then the unit admits a bleep every 10 seconds or so.
So PLEASE go to the Parrot web site and find the Parrot Minikit Slim icon and click on that and you will see a heading check compatibility of phone, Please Please do this or the unit will come up with all sorts of nominalises or the worst thing you will have to purchase another phone or send the unit back.
This I must stress this is not Parrots fault, as they try to cover as many phones as possible. I have made contact with a representative and was very informative and also assisted in an issue with the firm ware update problem I had but that was easy, I just got the connection sequence order wrong (My Fault)
To sum this unit up yes it’s great bit of kit, but I will only give it 7 out of 10 due to having to purchase another phone, all other features work great even the voice recognition with my Cornish accent, but if the unit does not understand some names you can just add a voice tag and get over it that way. The Sync of the phone just took a matter of seconds as did the pairing of your phone. This is all explained and described on the Parrot web site under the phone compatibility section; just follow the easy to read instructions based on your phone type. Can’t really comment on battery life, as I have only had it a couple of weeks. The menu is child’s play nothing complicated, which is short and to the point, comprises of Volume, address book which can be accessed through voice commands or manually using the large round toggle , voice tags, and sync section. And that’s it, nice and easy.
So to sum this up again PLEASE check the phone compatibility, if your phone is there then you will not be disappointed. Oh yes easy to install onto your sun visor and move around to other cars, in the house, or on your desk.
Cheers
gadgetman
Rating: 4 / 5