That's where Sagem hope their strangely named MyCK1 Bluetooth hands free system comes in. The unit is quite small about the size of a transistor radio (remember them?) and sports a small round speaker and a few essential controls, in fact it looks like an FM radio. The first thing that struck us was the unusual mounting arrangements, you'd expect a sucker system or maybe an air vent mount seeing as the unit is most likely to live in a car. But in a rather special way Sagem have opted for 2 choices, firstly a kind of clip which we can only presume is to hook over a sun visor. Not a bad plan expect to sit on a sun visor the supplied 12 volt power cable has to stretch from the centre console across the car up into the roof, which is frankly more than a little dangerous. We expect that Sagem hope users will rely on the 15 hour (talk time) battery to be more than enough for most users and with a 109 day standby they may be right.

The second option is a velcro mounting band which wraps around an object and slides into the back of the unit, again we assume this is a sun visor mount. So this posed us an issue how to attach the unit to out test vehicle? In the end we managed to hook the velcro system over the cars cup holder to gain a secure fixing. Pairing the Bluetooth hands free kit was easier, simply hold down the power button for approx 5 seconds and the lights flash and the unit beeps, then you search for it from your mobile, select pair and enter the pass code 0000.

With the 136 x 62 x 28mm MyCK1 and our Nokia mobile now connected we started to make some test calls while stationary, volume can be adjusted via the control roller wheel on top of the Sagem or via the volume control of the handset itself. Apart from some incessant beeping our calls while stationary worked well with callers hearing us clearly with the unit around 2 - 3 feet from where we were sat. The beeping seems to be a feature, the unit beeps when it connects / disconnects, if any change is made to the mobile or nay button is pushed. The result is a mad chirping sound which reminded us of a bus where the driver has the ticket system beeping at him to keep hitting a key every so often, no doubt to keep track of his route and progress, not what we'd want when driving a car!

We then started some moving tests having angled the little microphone directly towards us. At low speeds (under 30mph) the system seemed to cope although we could have done with a bit more volume. Head north of 40mph and the suppression of the speaker when you are talking seems to be triggered by mere background noise, to the point that at 70mph we couldn't hear the caller. Ok our car isn't the quietest but it is only 12 months old and fair silent by most people standards. We can only assume that the DSP technology is a bit sensitive and this ends up fighting ambient noise which rings true as you can hear the call after you finish talking but as you stay silent the callers volume drops off.

For a system costing £63 we were impressed with the battery life and the simplicity of the unit, however the mounting system and the over sensitive noise suppression make this a bit of a sod to use in daily life and for this reason alone we cannot recommend it over other in car systems are good quality headsets.

Published - 22/08/2006

More Bluetooth Car Kits-

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