Satechi Sound-Fly View Bluetooth FM transmitter review: Satechi Sound-Fly View Bluetooth FM transmitter

Testing the Satechi Sound-Fly View was something of a roller coaster ride of expectations. My first stab of disappointment came before I'd even unboxed the product.

7.3

Satechi Sound-Fly View Bluetooth FM transmitter

The Good

The <b>Satechi Sound-Fly View</b> gives you about a half dozen ways to get your audio and hands-free calls via your car stereo thanks to a combination of FM transmission, analog connections, and an SD card slot. A powered USB port helps keep portable devices charged while in use with the Sound-Fly View.

The Bad

Controls are a bit redundant in places and complex in others; the USB port doesn't read media; and Bluetooth audio streaming performed inconsistently during our testing.

The Bottom Line

The flexible Satechi Sound-Fly View has the right features and the right connections, but it needs a bit more design and polish.

Apparently, the marketing and design departments had a disagreement about the product's name. The box reads "SoundFly VIEW," but the product itself reads "Sound-Fly VIEW." Heading to the manufacturer's Web site adds yet a third typographic configuration to the mix, "Soundfly View." When I later attempted to pair the device with my smartphone, it identified itself as the "Sound-Fly VIEW," so I'm sticking with the hyphen.

Now, I'm not so shallow that inconsistent spelling would affect my scoring, but my "attention to detail" radar was on red alert.

Design
Unboxing the Sound-Fly, I was pleased to find that the device feels sturdy and well put together. The main unit measures 3.2 inches tall by 2.5 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick and is suspended on the end of a flexible 5.9-inch "goose neck" that can be bent and twisted into a variety of orientations. At the other end of that goose neck is a 12-volt power connector with an integrated rubber grommet that helps to hold anchor the whole assembly to your vehicle's power outlet.

The Sound-Fly View can be illuminated with orange, 'white,' and 'yellow' backlighting. However, those last two are slight misnomers.

The bulk of the unit's user-facing surface is occupied by a 2-inch monochromatic LCD display. You can adjust the LCD backlight color from white (which looks more like blue to my eyes) to yellow (which looks like lavender) to orange (which, to its credit, actually looks orange). Regardless of what color you choose, certain menu screens will always be rendered in their respective default colors--for example, the Quick Menu is always backlit orange and the main menu is always a bluish-white.

The IR remote control features dedicated buttons for many functions that are normally nested within menus.

Just below the screen are the physical controls used to interact with the device. At the center of this control panel is a knob that can be twisted to navigate the unit's menus and pressed like a button to make selections. To the knob's left are buttons for answering calls and skipping back, to its right are buttons for rejecting calls and skipping forward, and just below the knob--if you look closely--is the pinhole microphone input for hands-free calls.

Along the bottom edge is a 5-volt, 1-amp powered USB connection for charging a paired smartphone. Along the right edge is a full-size SD card slot that accepts SDHC cards of up to 32GB in capacity. Finally, the unit's left edge is home to a pair of 3.5mm analog audio connections, one for input and one for output. Invisible, save for an onscreen readout, is the unit's FM transmitter, which is used to broadcast a low-power audio signal to any FM radio nearby or, more specifically, your car's stereo system.

Also included in the Satechi Sound-Fly's box are a 3.5mm audio cable (so you won't have to BYO), a user manual, an IR remote control, and--oddest of all--an extra fuse for the 12-volt power connection. Such a curious inclusion is either proof that the engineers are running the show over at Satechi or that they expect you'll blow a fuse within the span of device's one-year warranty. I'm guessing it's the former.

Let's return, for a moment, to the IR remote. About an eigth of an inch thick, with a footprint that's slightly smaller than a business card, the IR controller is where Satechi's engineers crammed all of those buttons that wouldn't fit on the Sound-Fly's face. In addition to duplicating the on-device buttons, it has buttons for cycling through audio sources, quickly adjusting the FM transmitter's output frequency, and navigating SD card folders. There's even an option to set an A-B continuous audio loop for media played back from SD, although I'm not sure why you'd ever want to do that in a car. All in all, there are 18 buttons to be found on the remote controller.

Features
The Sound-Fly View's primary function is to receive Bluetooth hands-free calls and relay the audio to your vehicle's speakers via FM transmission. As an audio bridge, however, it has a few more thoughtful functions that have been engineered in.

After selecting and matching an empty FM frequency, you'll be able to hear the Sound-Fly View's audio output on your car's stereo.

For starters, let's stick with hands-free calling. You pair a device with the Sound-Fly using a four-digit PIN, but for phones and devices that support SSP (simple pairing profile) the pairing process is totally automated. I expected the Sound-Fly View to automatically attempt to download my phone's address book to its 500-contact memory, but it didn't. Fortunately, a manual sync is but a few menu options away. (It appears that each stored number counts as a contact, so if you have a home, office, and mobile number for a colleague, that counts as three contacts. This should only be a problem for those who keep thousands of contacts in a phone's memory.)

Once it's synced, you can browse your address book using the control knob. Voice control is not available on this unit, but you can access your handset's voice dialer (if available) by pressing and holding the green call button. Incoming calls are announced with the Sound-Fly's robotic voice; however, the caller's name is not spoken--only the phone number--because the unit lacks a true text-to-speech engine. Fortunately, you'll still be able to see the caller's name on the 2-inch display, provided that contact exists in the synced phonebook.

Tapping the call answer button when not actively on a call brings up a redial menu on which you can select and redial the last few calls dialed or missed.

When Bluetooth audio streaming works, you'll be able to view metadata on the View's screen and control playback with its buttons.

In addition to hands-free calling, the Sound-Fly supports A2DP audio streaming and AVRCP controls for compatible players. However, here's where things started to get wonky for me. Normally, I'm elated to see that a Bluetooth device supports the display of audio metadata, but in the Sound-Fly's case, this functionality is a bit of a mixed blessing. During my testing, I noticed that when paired with my Android smartphone, the Sound-Fly View would occasionally refuse to stream audio. With a bit of trial and error, I realized that the device was using the presence of metadata to trigger audio-streaming mode. This meant applications that don't report metadata can't stream to the Sound-Fly View. In my case, that meant I was restricted to the stock Android music player--no Pandora, no Spotify, no DoggCatcher podcast player, and no Google Maps turn-by-turn directions. As we say on the Internet, epic fail.

When the audio-streaming function did work properly, I could skip forward, skip backward, and pause playback.

Probably the best and most unexpected feature in the Sound-Fly View's bag of tricks is its ability to play back WMA and MP3 audio from an SD card. I was able to quickly browse the contents of an inserted SD card by either entering the SD MP3 Navi menu or quickly spinning the control knob. Double-tapping the control knob during playback toggles the Pause function.

When playing MP3s or WMA files from the SD card reader, yo ucan browse quickly using the Sound-Fly View's menus.

The USB port, as I stated earlier, is only used for charging. I'd have liked to see that port accept MP3 playback from USB storage keys or even an iPod Classic or Nano.

I did encounter quite a few control issues during my testing. For example, the control knob pretty much duplicates the function of the dedicated skip buttons when you're listening to Bluetooth audio or an SD card. And I'd have liked to see an easier way to change the FM transmission frequency--as is, you have to enter a menu. In areas with crowded airwaves, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, being able to quickly twist a knob to find a new free channel would be a boon. An automatic tuning function would be a godsend, but the Sound-Fly View doesn't support that feature either.

In sum
About the only thing that keeps me from wholeheartedly recommending the Sound-Fly View is my experience with the Bluetooth audio-streaming wonkiness. The device seemingly outsmarts itself by relying on metadata to automatically switch sources, when Bluetooth A2DP streaming is notoriously inconsistent with metadata transmission. A way to manually lock in the source would be nice.

Since I'm making a wish list, I'd like to see the control scheme tweaked to be easier to use, an automatic FM tuning function, and a voice-activated dialer.

However, in every other way the Sound-Fly View exceeded my expectations. The presence of SD audio playback is a pleasant surprise and makes the unit useful for feature phone owners who still want audio playback. The built-in USB charger makes up for the fact that the unit will basically be semipermanently blocking your car's charging port. And the analog audio input and output allow users to still connect unsupported devices with a cable or, in vehicles with an aux-input, get better sound quality out of the Sound-Fly than is possible over FM transmission.

The Sound-Fly View has features we don't necessarily need, such as this A-B loop function, but misses the mark with more basic ones, like an automatic FM tuner.

In fact, with the number of inputs and outputs available, you can go from Bluetooth to FM, Bluetooth to aux-input, SD to FM or aux-input, aux-output to FM, or--if you're feeling goofy--aux-output to aux-input with your audio.

My first impression of the Sound-Fly View was of a lack of attention to detail, but at the end of my testing I was left thinking differently. There's a clear engineer's attention to detail present here; why else would there be an extra fuse included in the packaging? Because an engineer thought it would be a good idea. However, what the Sound-Fly View needs is a bit more of a designer's or user interface specialist's perspective as well to help put it over the top.