Bluetooth Remote

[Admiral_Ackbar6]

Hey all,
After doing much fruitless searching, thought I would try and ask. I can find plenty of threads and topics about using a droid AS a Bluetooth remote, but I am looking FOR a Bluetooth remote. I have my phone mounted in my car with the windshield dock and connected through the aux port. It is a pain to have to reach up and select a tiny touch button to advance the song. I am looking for a AVRCP Bluetooth remote that will just do a simple next/previous/pause, and maybe answer phone. There are plenty of these products built into headphones, but I have not yet been able to just find a standalone remote. Anybody come across one or have an suggestions? Thanks.

Andrew

 

[CobaltKitsune]

Andrew,

I don't know if you've found what you're looking for yet, if you have, please share.

I'm in an almost identical position to you and was looking for the same thing. In some forum somewhere I learned about the jabra bt3030. It's a nifty little device the size of a dog tag, with the following controls on it's face:
Play/Pause
Track Forward
Track Back
(Unit) Volume up
(Unit) Volume down
Call/hangup (single button)

For our situations, I think it fits the bill. I paid ~$30 for mine. It's definitely chinese made, so the instructions are a little hard to follow but it's pretty self explanatory. The volume buttons don't control the phone volume but rather the jabra unit volume (if you had headphones in, I imagine it would control the sound from those). I mounted it with velcro just on my steering wheel so my left thumb could easily press it.

There is NO mic, however. I'm not sure if it relies on a mic on the headphones if they are attached. So you use your phone mic to talk.

And about phone calls. Because the 3030 has speakers but no mic (or some other unknown reason), my phone (droid 1) usually gets confused and routes a call through the bluetooth to the jabra speakers, instead of through the aux and then car speakers. This results in being absolutely unable to hear the person on the other end. Twice, I've been able to "just get it to work" somehow, and the call is played through the aux, but it usually ends up I have to manually switch from bluetooth to "speaker", which almost defeats the whole purpose of the setup. I've set the bluetooth profile for my jabra to just music, not music and phone, but maybe somehow it got switched.

When playing music, the thing works well. Sometimes there is a lag between pressing the next button and a response from my phone, but that could be any number of factors. BTW, I put in a Seidio dock in my car and power it through a cigarette lighter -> USB cable so it never sleeps. I don't know if this unit will work if your phone is asleep. I would guess so, my other bluetooth devices do.

My biggest and pretty much ONLY gripe is that sometimes the jabra unit loses the bluetooth connection with the phone and the music comes to a complete stop. I am not sure why, and I'm hard pressed to repeat the situations as it happens seemingly randomly. I've tried disabling wifi, turned off Locale's wifi polling, checked the bluetooth connection with other devices, and this is the only device that this happens to. I think maybe I got a faulty unit.

Anyways, sorry for being so longwinded.

Hope this helps you or somebody else!

Jabra BT3030

 

[proleshi]

Wow, I'm using my DROIDX in the SAME way through the AUX port and want the same thing.

Interesting info. Thanks guys. Will have to do some more searching....and see how many alternatives I can find...