iSymphony V1-BLUE Bluetooth Stereo System Works with your iPod and Your Mobile Phone
May 25, 2007 · Print This Article
The wall mountable iSymphony V1Blue is a relatively slim little system that manages to pack in a lot of punch feature-wise. It comes with a standard CD player, AM/FM radio, a clock radio, a wireless ipod dock, it can accept USB connections and it even has an SD, MMC and Memory Stick card slots for playing MP3 or WMA files. However, its most exciting feature though in our humble opinion is its bluetooth connectivity which allows you to stream music via A2DP, and you can even use it to connect to your phone to make conference calls via its built-in speakerphone. The V1Blue will alternate between Mobile phone and music with an incoming call notification. As for shear noise power, the stereo system has got a decent 45 watts. The iSymphony V1-BLUE Bluetooth Stereo System retails for $299.
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I’ve had the iPhone for a while now and there seems to be FOUR major flaws with the design:
1. It was made to work with AT&T and does not easily work with other networks. I think Apple missed out on becoming a serious world wide competitor because of this…
2. When working as an iPod it asks to be put into “AIRPLANE MODE”. Airplane mode sucks because the cell phone reception turns off.
3. There is no voice recognition, making bluetooth headsets much more useless and driving with headsets HIGHLY unsafe.
4. Safari, although the best cell phone browser and your ultimate best reason to buy an iPhone, does not support Macromedia Flash in web pages.
Anyways, I was pleased this Thanksgiving to find a workaround solution to the second problem which I would love people to exploit. The trick is to plug your iPhone into a speaker system WITHOUT using airplane mode and incuring that ugly cell phone noise that you hear when phone checks for messages, recieve calls, etc.. So far I have heard of people doing this by using the headphone jack and then heavily shielding the cable. But what I have discovered is that another viable technique technique is to seperate the iPhone from the primary audio circuitry via a bluetooth or otherwise wireless connection. I accomplished this by using an iSymphony V1 Blue speaker system. The iSymphony accomplishes its iPod connection by providing a docking base that is seperate from the unit, and which transmits the digital signal to the main unit via a bluetooth connection.
The iSymphony unit has another REALLY great feature though, which would seem to make it the definitive iPhone device- it has a bluetooth headset speaker phone mode. The only other place I’ve seen this is is nice cars like BMW’s or Acuras. You can pair with the main unit with the iPhone as a headset. You can be listening to your music as an iPod, then someone will start calling you and the music will fade away, and by pressing answer on the main unit you can start a speaker phone conversation with the caller. When the conversation is over you’ll go back to hearing the music as before.
It works pretty well. I am led to understand that this unit can also play bluetooth stereo music - something not offered by the iPhone but available on other mobles like the Motorola RAZR2. I don’t really care about boosting iSymphony sales or anything - I am only mentioning its capabilies to overcome the “Airplane Mode” problem. Indeed this is not the best speaker system I have heard. There are others that are at the $400 range and higher that do actually sound better. ISymphony however is at the $250 range. It can get pretty loud before distorting, but I don’t like the tweeters on it and the high frequency response is pretty bad. The clock time is only displayed when the unit is on standby and the unit doesn’t really work that well as an alarm clock. The remote control is stylish but the IR reception is horrible and only works half of the time. The “iPod external control” works on the iPhone but it has a strange occurence where tapping up or down on a menu screen causes the cursor to go up twice or down twice. I have seen this before when using iPhone on other systems. Also, if you do not seperate the iPod base far enough from the main unit you will still hear the cell phone RF distortions, so you’ll need some space to seperate them on your night table (mine is about 16 inches away). Nevertheless, it is a very useful piece of equipment and I’m glad that after shopping sooo long for an iPhone speaker system that I chose this one.
So if you’ve been looking for a speaker system that gracefully avoids the airplane mode problem I highly recommend this one or at least something with a remote bluetooth base.