Parrot MKi9200 Bluetooth Handsfree Calls & Music System
Product Details
Manufacturer: Parrot
Website: parrot
Typical Suggested Selling price: £175.99: Internet Price £159.99
Link To Purchase (Car Audio Direct): link
Installer locator page: link
In A Nutshell
A high quality handsfree Bluetooth telephone system with a large bias to being a music source as well, with SDHC, USB, iDevice and Aux input as well, as generic analogue music supply. It has a wide range of features and in particular has some of the very best speech recognition technology around, as well as top end noise cancellation on calls due to the well designed microphone and advanced DSP used inside the unit.
Overall 9.2
Sound Quality 9
Appearance/Display 9
Ease Of Use/HMI 10
Features 10
Value For Money 8
What It Is
Much as one hates to plagiarise, the company chose their words ever so carefully in their own simple description from their website, so I shamelessly rip it off here: ‘The Parrot MKi9200 is a Bluetooth hands-free system with a 2.4-inch high-resolution TFT colour screen. A wireless remote control can be positioned on the steering wheel or dashboard and allows the driver to control all the functions of the MKi9200. In addition to conventional telephony functions – pick up, hang up, dual calls – the Parrot MKi9200 boasts cutting-edge telephony functions: automatic phonebook synchronisation, training-free multi-speaker voice recognition, speech synthesis of the names in the phonebook, contact management (up to 2,000 per phone), call records, and so on. Its colour screen displays the phonebook, caller ID and photo, phone information and user settings. The menus and phonebook are also audible for easier, more intuitive use.’ You will excuse them at this point in the review for being proud of themselves enough to use words like ‘boasts’ and ‘intuitive’. There’s reams more but the crucial things are that as well as a simple aux input, you can plug in a USB doodad, or an iPod/Phone and there is an SDHC slot in the flank of the screen. This is their handsfree system more aimed at music handling, is the point, as you can see from the pictures.
The particular unit used in the review was sent to the boss of Decibel Drag Racing UK, Mr. Darren Millard. He drives an Audi A3 up and down the country and even over to Holland, (which he was just about to undertake when we sent him the MKi9200 system) to run bass head nutter contests under the dB Drag and Bass Race formats. One of the UK’s ‘Daddies’ of Bass (along with Marcos Barnes, owner of Propper Droppers and Andrew Ackerley of EMMA) he is fielding calls at quite a rate as contests draw near and he has to offer directions and speak to those wondering if they are too late to enter and call at seven a.m. on a show day and so forth. He had an aching need for handsfree and in return for the use of his installation skills and ears, (which bizarrely are in full working order, as he runs the dB Drag UK scene not sits in the winners’ cars) Parrot very kindly said he could have the MKi9200 kit for the good of helping run dB Drag the smoother. At time of writing, Darren has had all summer to really get to know the system but has only used iPod and iPhone connection and left the SD and USB stuff unused, although he has tested the line-in facility.
In the dB Drag Audi A3&;.
Editor Review : Parrot MKi9200 Bluetooth Handsfree Calls & Music System
How Is It Made?
Make no mistake, Parrot are a damn clever multi-platform electronics AND engineering firm and have some bloody awesome products – and that in the UK use of the word as in, you learn about a thing and genuinely go WOW! Like their Zik headphones, or their Zikmu speakers, or the bloody clever Asteroid head unit that was ages ahead of its time. Let alone the AR.Drone2.0 HD video-equipped quadricopter that you can flip in flight and uses its own actual pressure-driven altimeter to get it to hover at an exact spot! But this product, right here is their core. This, the Parrot MKi9200, is what they do best.
Thus, the dual headed microphone which is an echo-cancelling effort, is well-formed so as not to add any near-field acoustic ‘signature’ of its own as the sound gets to it. (It’s what makes stupider designed microphones sound ‘plasticy’ or ‘cuppy’ as HiFi nutters would have it.) Likewise the screen is neat as ninepence and the buttons on the small eggy remote thing have a healthy ‘breakout force’ – in that you can feel when you have operated the control, no mushiness there. It is well made and beautifully presented in the packaging when you get iteven given that it is definitely an expert installation job as you can see from the dashboard of Darren Millard’s Audi A3, having its guts hanging out during fitment, below&;
How Well Does It Work?
Well, Millard-San is impressed. He told Talk Audio magazine, ‘I do find I talk more. You call while you drive as something to do!’ Before adding, ‘Luckily, I am now on an unlimited minutes contract. I was finding myself horribly close to my limit after I had it installed!’ As explained above, Darren has had a iPod and an iPhone to connect to the A3 and he has got one OEM connectivity problem. He hasn’t really hacked the Audi A3 system properly, in that he has gone ‘in’ via a telephone feed and as such, it sends output only to his front speakers. This is still a minor work in progress, as Darren has obtained the correct fascia adapter panel and the right loom to enable use of an after market head unit, which will cure that.
He explained that it took a little getting used to and that it was way better than the factory fitted extra optional iPhone connector kit that had been in there previously. Dazza was particularly impressed with the easy quality of the voice recognition technology. ‘Voice recognition was far better than I had expected. It doesn’t matter who says it in the car, it’ll call what ever name from the phone is told it at the time.’ Another thing he revealed was that he had without asking, been told by several people just how remarkably clear and easily intelligible the system was when they were on the phone to him. He installed the dual microphone right in the centre of the car’s screen at the top, after reading up some advice online on the forums and has found this works wonderfully well.
One small negative is almost certainly to do with the Garbage-In-Garbage-Out or ‘GIGO’ law in that Darren is a bit obsessive about making sure that SOME sort of image is attached to his music on his iPhone and iPod. He even explained to me how to plop the image into the right cover art location within iTunes. I swear he was about to start explaining how to go find and copy images from the Internet.. He must think I am SO useless&;
But he has found the resultant images that show up on the screen of his cute dash unit are fuzzy. He then revealed that he was using 200×200 pixel pictures and promised he would try some higher resolution images and see how they looked. Me, I didn’t even care to bother to find out you could add to the metadata schtick on iTunes.
Anyway, Darren Millard has found it to be more than slightly life enhancing. He used to have no kit and take the risk but now says, ‘It’s brilliant. I don’t know how anyone could live without hands free. It eliminates all the pressure and fear of getting caught. You press one button and speak&;.. and you can accept or reject a call by talking, to it, too. It’s very easy to scroll through the menus.’ Before finally telling me his scores and finishing off with ‘I’d be lost without my MXi9200 to be honest, it’s coming with me to my next car as well! Parrot’s hands free is brilliant!’
So there you have it, a totally super and micro-compact set of kit that does all the music and telephony you could wish for. A nice Internet Radio app on all you can eat data and you could even have North Pole Radio in your car via the iPhone if you wanted to&;
Easily scores enough to count as a Talk Audio Best Buy.
Darren Millard (and myself) wants to offer a huge ‘thank you’ to Jonathan Kitto of Parrot who made it all happen.
Full Features & Specifications
Bluetooth
Bluetooth v2.0 + EDR
Supported profiles: HFP (Hands Free Profile); A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile); AVRCP (Audio Video Remote Control Profile); OPP (Object Push Profile); PBAP (Phone Book Access Profile)
Maximum range: 10 meters – 33 feet
Pairing: PIN code “0000”
Up to 10 paired devices
Automatic connection (enabled or disabled)
Dimensions of the screen: 72 x 57 x 12mm
Audio
External double microphone, direction is adjustable
Full Duplex
DSP-3: Echo cancellation, advanced noise reduction
Feed voice and music on car’s speakers
Music
Multiple connectors: iPods (from fifth generation); USB, SD card, SD-HC card and Line-In
Play music from any Bluetooth Stereo (A2DP) compatible devices
Virtual Super Bass
Sound Spatializer
Digital Class-D 20W amplifier
Phonebook
Dual Mode (Multipoint): simultaneous connection of two Bluetooth telephones
Automatic phonebook synchronisation
User-independent voice recognition
Text To Speech: Vocal synthesis of the phonebook
Number of contacts: up to 8,000 in total; up to 2000 per paired phone
Processor
Microprocessor Parrot5 (32 bits) at 208MHz
Memory: Flash = 32 Mbits – RAM = 16Mbits
Pack contents
1 Colour TFT 2.4in screen
1 Six-button remote control keypad
1 External dual microphone
1 Parrot Universal Radio Mute box with iPod/iPhone & USB cables
1 Steering wheel mounting kit for remote control
1 Dashboard mounting kit for screen
1 Screen cable
1 Mute cable with ISO connectors
1 Set of accessories
1 Quick Start Guide