Alpine plus Sony Ericsson equals beautiful music

While conducting a review of the car stereo with the Alpine KCA-100BT Bluetooth module, we noticed a reference in the manual to streaming music via Bluetooth. Always eager to try out the latest technology, we grabbed a colleague who happened to have a Sony Ericsson K790A phone and pulled him into our lab. The phone and Alpine's Bluetooth module both use A2DP, a wireless protocol with enough bandwidth for streaming music.

We got the phone paired up with the car stereo easily, and music from the phone started playing through our car stereo speakers. New tech experiences like that always make us a little giddy. Even better, there was some control of the music on the phone from the car stereo. Buttons on the stereo pause, play, and skip tracks for music on the phone, which is very cool, but no song title or other information is displayed on the car stereo. Maybe that will happen in the next generation. When a call came in, the music paused, and the car stereo acted like a speaker phone. The phone takes Sony's micro Memory Sticks, which go up to 2GB, allowing for a pretty hefty library of music in the car, all without having to bring along discs or a separate MP3 player.