Parrot Boombox: Bluetooth speaker system
Looking to get the most out of your mobile's music collection? Have a gander at this Bluetooth beast -- it lets you blast your tunes wirelessly
Listen up, hoodies: if your nearest and dearest are on the verge of murdering you because of your penchant for listening to music through your mobile phone's tinny, squealing-cat speaker, here's a way to sort your mobile music life out.
Behold the Bluetooth beast that is the Parrot Boombox, an iPod Hi-Fi-like speaker system that blasts out tunes from your mobile, MP3 player, computer and any other device via Bluetooth or a standard headphone jack. Of course, it's not portable, but it offers a handy living-room audio solution for listening to digital music from multiple sources.
We gave it a quick workout and were very impressed with the audio quality -- the entire office yelled at us to turn it down. It works as expected with the 3.5mm headphone cable provided, which plugs into any compatible device, but we had a few teething problems with the Bluetooth connectivity.
You need to make sure the phone or computer you want to connect it to supports the A2DP (stereo Bluetooth) profile and even though all our devices did, the sound quality played up, but Parrot told us we were sent a faulty unit.
It costs £150, which is reasonable considering the iPod Hi-Fi costs £229, and it should be out very soon. -Andrew Lim