Why You Can Trust CNET Sony Ericsson Bluetooth Car Handsfree HCB-150 review: Sony Ericsson Bluetooth Car Handsfree HCB-150
The HCB-150 is good at what it does, but it is a shame it doesn't include all the features we want to see in a hands-free car speaker. Oh, and it's a bit ugly.
Design
Sony Ericsson is behind some of our favourite phone and portable speaker designs, though the same can't be said for car speakerphones, unfortunately. The edges of the speakerphone are rounded and tilted, so that the unit looks like a parallelogram rather than a solid rectangle, which is neat, but overall the HCB-150 is quite drab.
Sony Ericsson Bluetooth Car Handsfree HCB-150
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
For a portable device, the HCB-150 is quite large, its 130x80x25mm dimensions are roughly the size of a block of cheddar cheese (though not as thick). Most of this space is dedicated to the pair of 2-Watt speakers on the top of the unit, the rest is taken up by the HCB-150's control wheel. On the front of the unit is a monochrome OLED display, and the underside houses rails to attach the sun-visor clip. Whilst uninteresting to look at, we've found the display to be easy to read quickly while also concentrating on the road.
Features
For a speakerphone, the HCB-150 has most of the features we like to see, but not all of them. It supports Bluetooth connections, of course, and will auto-pair with known devices, though the HCB-150 doesn't support A2DP stereo playback for streaming music from your phone through the speakers. Similarly, the HCB-150 doesn't feature an FM transmitter, like Motorola's MOTOROKR T505, which would have allowed you to stream the audio from your calls through your car's stereo system.
Once you've paired your phones — the unit remembers and can switch between up to five at a time — the HCB-150 automatically syncs with your contacts giving you access to your phone book without having to pre-program it. While it supports five phones at a time, only one can be active, and this is adjusted by switching between user profiles.
To keep your eyes on the road, the HCB-150 supports voice commands and will convert text to speech, like reading aloud your address book. We found the voice recognition to be very accurate for sifting through the hundreds of entries in our contacts list.
Performance
Though we'd have liked the convenience of an FM transmitter, the built-in speakers were quite impressive. Even with the top off our convertible (yep, that's how we roll) we could clearly hear the audio coming through the HCB-150.
We tested the speakerphone with HTC's Touch Diamond smartphone and the Nokia N95 8GB, and both paired and worked flawlessly. We were disappointed to find that audio from a range of the phone's other software, like Telstra's Whereis Navigator on the Diamond, isn't routed through the HCB-150 and to its far superior speaker set.