Every aspect of the Motorola Roadster Pro’s design and functionality is about keeping your eyes on the road. It uses voice controls and motion sensors so that your hands don’t have to leave the steering wheel in order to make or answer a call, skip a song and mute the conversation. In addition, the four-mic system and dual-speaker design provide the best noise and echo cancellation so that your phone conversations are extremely clear. For these reasons, the Motorola Roadster Pro earns the Top Ten Reviews for best Bluetooth car kit.
Speakerphone Performance
The best feature of the Motorola Roadster Pro is the quad-microphone system – twice as many microphones dedicated to picking up your voice as you get with other Bluetooth car kits. One of the difficulties that every Bluetooth car kit contends with is background noise and echoing caused by the microphone picking up the caller’s voice from the speaker. The four microphones allow for better filtering of the audio because they can better distinguish between your voice and the background noise while ensuring that you don’t get feedback when the caller talks.
The Roadster Pro also features HD voice technology that relaxes the bandwidth frequency range of your voice and the caller’s voice so that it sounds like your caller’s in your car. The standard narrowband frequency for phone calls is only 300Hz to 3.4kHz. The narrowness of this frequency range causes the voice to sound tinny and flat because this only covers a small portion of the human voice’s frequency range, which is approximately 80Hz to 14kHz. HD voice simply widens the frequency range to 50Hz up to 7kHz so that more detail is present in the voice, leading to better communication.
You can also use multiple devices at the same time. Many Bluetooth car kits allow you to connect multiple devices, but only one device can pair at a time. With multipoint sharing, you can have your personal mobile phone and your work phone paired to it at the same time. If you’re on a call with an old friend and you receive a call from your boss, you can answer the work phone and your friend will be put on hold until you’re finished with your boss’s call.
Hands-Free Performance
The Motorola Roadster Pro has all the controls and features you’d expect with one of the best Bluetooth car kits. It has the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) for streaming audio from your phone or tablet, allowing you to stream music and GPS directions. It has the Hands-Free Profile (HFP), which allows you to use voice commands to perform various actions, such as answering and ending calls or dialing someone from your contact list. It also features the Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP), which allows it to access your contacts for voice dialing and caller ID. It also has the Audio/Visual Remote Control Profile, which allows you to control your phone or tablet from the Roadster Pro.
Motorola provides a mobile app that provides text-to-voice and voice-to-text abilities. This allows you to hear your incoming text messages instead of reading them, ensuring that your eyes remain on the road. Likewise, it allows you to dictate text messages, status updates for social networking sites and emails. You never have to look away from the road.
Battery Performance
One of the downsides of the Motorola Roadster Pro is the 13-hour battery life, which is among the shortest for a car Bluetooth kit. However, this is only a minor flaw. The 13-hour battery life is good enough for long road trips. Also, you’re not likely going to take it far from the car charge plug while you use it. The standby battery life is six weeks, meaning it can go that long when not in use before requiring a charge.
To conserve energy, the Motorola Roadster Pro has an automatic on and off feature controlled with motion sensors. When you leave your car, it turns off. When you return to your car, it turns back on. You don’t have to worry about finding the power switch or waiting 30 minutes for it to automatically turn off like most Bluetooth car kits.
Help & Support
This kit comes with a one-year warranty, which is the industry standard. Motorola also features some of the best customer support available for a Bluetooth hands-free car kit. Not only can you contact support representatives through phone or email, but the live chat feature provides an easy and effective way to get immediate help with an issue. In addition, Motorola provides an app to help optimize the speakerphone experience. You can also access additional downloads, manuals and a FAQs page to help you resolve any issues or questions you have.
Summary
The Motorola Roadster Pro features the only quad-microphone system for a Bluetooth car kit, which provides the clearest call quality available. There’s vocal commands, audio streaming, text-to-speech capabilities and speech-to-text capabilities. It is the best Bluetooth car kit because it allows you to hold high-quality speakerphone conversations while keeping your eyes safely on the road.