Recently I was lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to try out a couple of Motorola gadgets from Verizon for a few weeks. The Roadster 2 is a Bluetooth speaker made to clip to your vehicle’s sun visor and is intended for making hands free calls. The P4000 is a portable charger for charging up mobile devices while you are on the move or don’t have an outlet handy.
Motorola Roadster 2
I did not find this device to be very functional for the intended task of making hands free phone calls from my truck. The recorded voice on the device calling out instructions can be heard loud and clear, but I never was able to have a coherent phone conversation with another person. I always found myself grabbing my phone and shutting the Bluetooth feature off to finish the call. My somewhat noisy cab in my diesel truck providing white noise likely did not help matters.
However I did find two great uses for the Roadster 2 when my wife and I spent a long weekend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee earlier this year. As we’ve let our satellite radio subscriptions expire you know how constantly flipping through channels to find a decent AM or FM station on the radio while travelling can be annoying. We found that using the internet radio apps on our phones came through loud and clear on the Roadster. Free radio with no subscription fees from our house 8 hours south to Pigeon Forge without hunting around the radio dial as you go between towns.
The Roadster 2 also worked very well with the navigation features on both my wife’s iPhone and my Galaxy Nexus. As with the internet radio apps the nice navigation lady inside our phones came through loud and clear to help us find our way to the cabin in the Smokies.
The battery life was very good as well. The device goes into standby mode when your phone is far enough away. However, you may find yourself answering a call outside of your vehicle only to discover your conversation is happening in the car on the Roadster meaning you can’t hear the other person until you walk further away or turn off Bluetooth.
So if your car doesn’t have Bluetooth from the factory the Motorola Roadster 2 might be worth a look even if I don’t think it handles phone calls very well.
Motorola P4000 Portable Power Pack
Who doesn’t need more juice on their mobile devices? I know I do. This little power pack is roughly the same size as my phone. It will easily give my phone a full charge although it does seem to take longer than being plugged into a wall outlet. The P4000 would not charge my ASUS tablet, but it had no problem with an iPad. A mini USB charging cable can be pulled from the power pack to charge most phones. It also features a full size USB port on the side which is very nice as most tablet wall chargers I’ve seen are also USB compatible.
I’m going to be sad to see this little guy go because I’ve been using it a lot. Something like this would be great for attending meetings where I might want to provide my own wi-fi by tethering my tablet to my phone. Tethering pulls a lot of battery power. I don’t have a data plan for either of my tablets so I provide connectivity through my phone whenever I’m in the tractors or combine. The P4000 can keep my phone going for most of a long day in the field, and I can always plug either one into the 12V port where I keep a dual USB jack plugged in.
These items were fun to play with for a while, but I don’t get to keep them! This “free” stuff might make me go spend some money on a portable power pack of my own after I pack this one and send it home.
Do you have any favorite mobile gadgets?
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Use the internet to find out what radio stations are in what towns.Thats how we do it.Sounds like a good deal