Parrot ASTEROID Smart 2-DIN Touchscreen Headunit
Product Details
Manufacturer: Parrot
Website: Parrot
Typical Selling price: £499.99
In A Nutshell
A double DIN headunit with no mechanism but a very high degree of connectability. With GPS, external microphone and iPod lead supplied, as well as two further USB cables included. There is a reverse camera connection, a stereo audio/video aux input, steering wheel remote control port and RCA outputs for six channels (F/R/Sub) as well as full auxiliary audio/video output. The unit is largely about its connection to 3G or 4G telephony/data services and the use of internet radio and other connected apps such as navigation as well as its use of SD cards and multiple USB devices. It features a tiny removable security panel.
SCORES
Sound Quality 8
Appearance/Display 10
Ease Of Use/HMI 7
Features 10
Value For Money 10
Overall 9.0
What It Is
The first impression is a simple double DIN unit but when you heft it out of the box it comes in, you realise that just like the original Asteroid unit, the device really doesn’t take up an awful lot of cubic. It does not go back very far into that double-DIN space.
It is packaged beautifully, with fully recyclable cardboard boxes and arrives with a good collection of high quality USB cords, including one that goes a notch better than the original Asteroid’s. In that while you get a special USB socket on the back, as part of a row of no less than four of these holes, just for iPod, the actual iPod connector is now on a short ready-mated-to-USB cord as an extension to the wire, so you could use that fourth USB socket just as USB-sticks if you were not an iPod person by unplugging these last three inches. This is pretty cool.
The unit also arrives with an SD card in a case, with the mapping upon it and you use the same slot as the music-carrier SD slot to get the tunes to the air. The slot hides behind this very small panel that clips out to become your security device. It is held in during operation with tiny neodymium magnets. Sadly, there is no carry case for this included. It’d be a whole extra tooling for the injection moulding but at the standards that such other Parrot products as Zik are made to, it ill behoves them not to have a case.
Editor Review : Parrot Asteroid Smart Double DIN Head Unit
The guys at Parrot are just somehow ineffably cool. And that goes for the female employees, too as whomever does the hiring only likes cool people. It is a genuine corporate identity and goes all the way to the top in Paris, where the boss hires one of the single most cool designers of our lifetime to make the stuff he wants, look the way he thinks it aughta. So, we have speakers that rap stars love to include in their music videos without any product placement going on and a set of ‘˜Zik’ headphones so sexy that stroking them on the tube to change track or change the volume will make you feel like the Commuter With The Mostest.
And while Parrot are the undeniable market leaders when it comes to getting into bed with massive fellow manufacturers to supply them with their Bluetooth solutions, they are also recent players in the headunit game themselves. I have been an early adopter of the Asteroid single-DIN unit and it has some foibles but we were promised a whole family of little Asteroids. Now, it has happened and we have got our mitts on the big one, also available as a hide-away box and slightly smaller separate touch-only screen (called the Tablet) the Smart is a bigger badder thing than the single-DIN Asteroid and has a heap of more clever stuff going on. (like up to 5,000 contacts, instead of only 2,000, for TEN phones, f’rinstance!)
How Well Does It Work?
I plugged the unit in, in all directions, plopped the GPS antenna in the back, beside the microphone and put the GPS doodah upon the window sill and got to work. I tried the neat removable bit, lovely. Now to learn more I am old and hate the modern trend to manuals only being on line, as the genuine environmental cost to print your own is actually worse to the environment than when they print in bulk! But I guess most folks will either just read online and go play with the unit afterwards, or take a laptop onto the driveway. The supplied printed start up guide is good, though. But while paper remains so easy to recycle, I do feel the manual-free route is a service of cost cutting for the maker, rather than borne of environmental awareness. Clarion put theirs at least onto a CD so not demanding net connection. (I think I’m reading like the old dude in ‘˜UP!’ now)
I rapidly spun up some iPod tunes, stuffed the 8GB Sandisk USB ‘˜bean’ onto the end of one USB cord I had fitted and flapped over the top of the unit in the bench. It read the files, told me they were titled but wouldn’t play them as the damn thing is corrupted. Better luck off SD, as I had stuffed that up the little orifice and it sounded great.
One BIG omission is iPod video. You could plug in a camcorder or a portable DVD player with AV outputs if you like but NOT an iPod Touch with digital editions of movies you own. (I have Paul, Puss In Boots, Up! and JJ Abrams’ Star Trek in mine.) You can use the AV-in and a generic iPod 30-pin-to-AV-sockets wire from Apple and see those films but that is just iPod battery power, control from iPod only and not really about ‘˜ease of use’ as there will be no headunit control and it won’t last to Scotland. Ironically, I connected a Clarion iPod video J-Lead up and the moving pics showed on the screen and the video soundtrack played on the main audio but only when the moving picture was not selected! Odd but to do with it being a Clarion wire. My point is, that I reckon this aughta be possible, to ALSO power the iPod, as I clearly heard the happy ‘˜ploink!’ noise it makes when you connect to the power on this lead. It is a political issue, though, as you are supposed to connect the handbrake to the system so moving pictures only show when you are stopped.
But basically, it does need a dedicated J-Link wire making for charging, iPod video-allowing and made available for Asteroid use with video-capable smartphones as well.
The really big story is the stuff you can do with internet connection. So while I managed to play Bluetooth music from my BlackBerry, it was more of a buzz to have paired the Smart for ‘˜net use with my BB as hub. And the device comes with a special three month free trials offer on apps on the Asteroid market, with stuff such as Deezer, Tunein and WAZE navigation.
I gather the system developer kit is available, and that apps are breeding apace right now. This is still a relatively spotty-faced teenager of a product. Talented, brash and horribly more clever than the generation before, as well as better looking, apart from the odd zit!
Must tell you, that while there are still things to learn and do for this device, to my UTTER hilarity, one reviewer on another publication with a superb rep in the trade for missing the ruddy point, actually marked this product down, for not having a CD player in it!
It is the most connected headunit around right now and also available as touchscreen-only flavour, as described, so the other reviewer might have admitted, had he known, that his love of CD would mean he would have the Asteroid Tablet but hey. I was deeply impressed yet it gives me fear about data charges is all and me getting used to all I can eat back home, then driving through France and getting flagellated on data by habitual use! But that is to punish a Child Of The Future for the as yet primitive data ecosystem it was born into. The world WILL catch up and this is the future, as predicted by some fat bloke at ‘˜Live ’96’. This device is EXACTLY what I predicted back then
The Asteroid Tablet
‘One day, we will see all discs as ‘˜quaint’ since all data, TV and music will be in the aether. (cloud) All control will be by touch screen and it will stay a good size, despite today’s trend for tiny phones, as our human hands will demand this. We will have all the accumulated knowledge of mankind at our fingertips and all the music ever written in history will be instantly accessible at the press of a screen icon.’ Adam Rayner, script, Live ’96 Entitled: ‘The Future’
Why Buy It?
It’s leading edge it’s new and it is very sexy in use and if you have the right mindset to get to grips with it and plunder all it can do, it will really impress you and your more tech savvy mates. The screen is good if not awesome and the sheer cleverness of all the app functions go a long way to making up for some of the weird weaknesses, like the lack of an iPod Video function ability with their OWN J-Link cable.
Full Features & Specifications
General
Telephony: answer/make a call, reject/end a call, volume, double call, menus, phonebook, settings and options, play/pause, forward, backward
Software update via USB key or live by the internet
Android web service Apps compatible
Steering-wheel controls compatible
Removable security segment of side panel
Colour TFT touchscreen 6.2in display 800×480 res.
Music/Radio
Vocal Music Search (Artist, Album)
Compatibility with iPod by cable, USB, SD, Line input, AV input
Subwoofer control
Virtual Superbass effect
Parametric equaliser: 7 bands, 6 defined presets, 1 user preset
FM/AM tuner with no limitation for presets
With RDS Text+- PS – TP – PTY RT
Audio/Bluetooth
Full duplex conversations
External adjustable double microphone
Parrot noise reduction NR 3.0
Echo cancellation AEC
Dispatch voice and music on car’s speakers
4 x 55W built-in MOSFET amplifier
4x USB connections (one especially for iPod/iPhone)
6x RCA pre-amp outputs (2 with subwoofer)
Bluetooth v2.1+ EDR
Profiles: HFP, Bluetooth Stereo (A2DP), OPP, PBAP, HSP,SPP and AVRCP
Pairing: via PIN code ‘˜0 0 0 0’
Phonebook management
Automatic phonebook synchronization
Synchronization: PBAP, Sync ML, OPP, Synchro AT, Synchro Nokia
Automatic connection with mobile phones
Training-free, multi user voice recognition
Voice synthesis
Text To Speech
Up to 10 paired phones
Number of contacts: up to 5,000 per phone – 50,000 in total per unit
Complete with:
1x Parrot ASTEROID Smart unit
1x ISO cable
1x GPS receiver with USB connector
1x USB male 1.5m to USB female cable
1x iPod USB to USB cable 1.2m
1x Jack cable male to male 1.5m (audio device)
1x Quick start guide
1x Double external microphone
1x Mounting Sleeve