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A while back, I bought myself a cool Bluetooth car kit. Finally, after a month of waiting, it was fitted Saturday. And it was pretty cool. I rang half the people I know in the car on the way back from Kidderminster just to say “woo! look! I am talking to you without holding the phone! I am so l33t!” Now, however, I would like to register a number of complaints about it.

1. There’s some kind of odd interaction between it and the phone. Sometimes the phone registers that it’s there when I get in the car and sometimes it doesn’t. Turning them both off and back on again always fixes it, but I should basically never ever have to turn my phone off, so that’s shit.
2. The voice recognition seems to be arse. I can’t get voice dialling to work at all; it doesn’t recognise the names I say, no matter how much I try. I think that this is because I record the voices by speaking into the phone, but I dial the voices by speaking through the car kit’s mic, and they sound different. However, as far as I can tell, it’s not possible to record a voice dialling name through the car kit, so that puts me SOL on that front.
3. The bloke was not all that helpful in terms of what’s actually required. I asked if I had to leave Bluetooth turned on on my phone to make it work, and he didn’t know; I don’t really want to leave it on and discoverable all the time, because my phone will get 0wned. I could experiment, but this is enormously complicated by item 1.

None of these things are very serious. It’s a cool piece of equipment. But there is one other complaint I have which is more serious.

It’s stopped fucking working.

That’s right. Three days after the bastard was fitted, after a month of waiting, it doesn’t work. It just won’t turn on. It’s driven both through its own on/off switch and through the ignition; either will turn it on, so you don’t have to remember to switch it on every time you get in but you can have it on while the car’s not running. Neither of these things turn it on. If you try and turn it on when the engine’s not running, the speaker makes a sad little crackle-pop sound and nothing else happens. Possibly the same thing happens when the ignition turns it on, but I can’t tell that because, well, the engine’s running and so I can’t hear it.

So I rang Carphone Warehouse. They were ridiculously unhelpful. I can’t take it in on a work day, because I’m at work, duh. I got told, well, you’ll just have to wait for the next Saturday appointment. Three months away. No. That’s totally fucking unsatisfactory. You sold me a product and now it’s broken; I am not going to wait for months until you can be bothered to fix it. Eventually, after ten minutes of phone wrangling, the bloke agreed to send someone out to fix it. Of course, he couldn’t give a time more accurate than a few hours, and it couldn’t be on a Saturday. So now I have to have a day off work and sit around the house waiting for someone to come out and fix the fucking thing.

Not happy about this.