Thread: Willit work with Parrot bluetooth adapter?

I am interested in picking one up, says pre order but then says in stock? Is this available yet if not any eta at all? thanks

Originally Posted by meth68

I am interested in picking one up, says pre order but then says in stock? Is this available yet if not any eta at all? thanks

It has been pre-order for a couple of months now. SD staff...any updates?

Any news on the bluetooth stack update.

Can anyone explain why it will only work this the mp3car dongle and not the parrot?

Originally Posted by jbird12345

Can anyone explain why it will only work this the mp3car dongle and not the parrot?

because that's how it was designed. The SD team did not want to rely on the OS BT stack for (I believe) reliability reasons.

Originally Posted by Siezmik

I don't believe that the SD staff ever said that the Parrot Bluetooth dongles would work. They were working with Parrot on a customized piece of hardware, but due to various issues that fell through. So, Parrot hardware was mentioned yes, but never an off-the-shelf dongle.

I just bought SD North America on 1/8/2008 and on the back it says Additional Features:
(6th bullet point down)
>Bluetooth Phone Integration (requires Parrot(tm) USB Adapter


That is big typo to have still going out to all the people buying street deck!

Still waiting..

I wanted to purchase SD since I first got into car pc's and have been watching, waiting patiently but this seems like a joke to me. With proprietary BT and Nav its turning into a deal breaker for me. I like the interface of SD, works and looks good but the BT kinda bugs me, unless I am not understanding something there is no reason to "force" us to use a certain dongle if we want to have BT working. Its a generic protocol that supports communication services between 2 devices.

The proprietary use of MS MP is garbage as well IMO. It seems that, to me at least, SD is just about turning a profit on every turn instead of actually delivering a solid, working front end, thats open to users preference.

I think that if SD was opened up a bit to allow more 3rd party add ons it would actually turn more of a profit. I have run out of patience waiting. Thats just my 2 cents though.

I wish SD the best in the future but for me, ack.. moving on.

Originally Posted by Ducter

Still waiting..

I wanted to purchase SD since I first got into car pc's and have been watching, waiting patiently but this seems like a joke to me. With proprietary BT and Nav its turning into a deal breaker for me. I like the interface of SD, works and looks good but the BT kinda bugs me, unless I am not understanding something there is no reason to "force" us to use a certain dongle if we want to have BT working. Its a generic protocol that supports communication services between 2 devices.

If you look at the threads where the SD staff talks about why bluetooth isn't ready yet, you'll find that they investigated using a generic dongle/hardware, but found out that it wasn't reliable enough to meet their standards. I think this is likely true...if you take a look at the various 3rd party BT solutions, you'll find that they either don't support some phones, have very limited support for the features of some phones, or don't integrate well (since they are proprietary solutions as well).

PhoneCo, a popular 3rd party BT phone software was recently discontinued due to lack of true support for phones other than Sony Ericsson. I had a Sony Ericsson flip phone, and it wouldn't even support that fully (through no fault of the developer, it was because the flip phones implement BT differently). In my opinon (from reading the threads around here), Freefone has many of the same operability problems.

Even if the basic functions of the phone work correctly, there is still the issue of echo cancellation within the car environment...something that Parrot solves with hardware. For the phone to be truly integrated into the car, it needs to have the ability to be used through the car's stereo system (this is how OEM BT integration is accomplished). Solving the echo issues can be done through software, but given that StreetDeck is installed by end users on widely varying systems, it would be incredidibly difficult for SD to support echo cancellation through software alone. Most BT dongles don't have any sort of echo cancellation built in, as they are not intended for in car telephony use...so if the SD team is requiring custom hardware for this reason, I think it's a reasonable choice.

Finally, the other software solutions out there aren't truly integrated into the frontend...they may be skinnable (a la PhoneCo), but they likely still display the type of interoperability issues that crop up between frontends and third party programs.

The proprietary use of MS MP is garbage as well IMO. It seems that, to me at least, SD is just about turning a profit on every turn instead of actually delivering a solid, working front end, thats open to users preference.

How is using Mappoint any more "proprietary" than using any other third party nav software out there? And if you don't want to use Mappoint, you don't have to do so...there is at least one digital mod that allows the use of another mapping program within SD.

Also, I'm not sure how incorporating Mappoint illustrates how SD is "turning a profit" at the cost of the end user. If you buy Mappoint outright, it's a very expensive program (>$200, if I remember correctly). If you buy SD, then you get the mappoint data included for less than the purchase price of the program itself...

I think that if SD was opened up a bit to allow more 3rd party add ons it would actually turn more of a profit. I have run out of patience waiting. Thats just my 2 cents though.

This conflicts with your statement above asking for a solid, stable frontend, in my opinon. If third party add ons were allowed (and they are...just requires that the third party write a digital mod), then SD would be placed in the position of attempting to support all of those add ins as well as their own software. The boards would be filled with bug reports asking why a particular third party mod didn't work correctly.

I wish SD the best in the future but for me, ack.. moving on.

Sorry to hear that...but I think you'll find that other frontends have quite a few problems of their own. The "flexibility" in configuration you desire can also be viewed from another perspective - you have to do all the configuration work yourself.

I certainly recognize that SD has issues, and I would have liked some of them to have been fixed before now. However, if there was another program that was vastly superior to SD, then I think users would have found it and be recommending it above all others. Each frontend has it's strenghts and weaknesses...

I must say that Streetdeck does seem to still be the better piece of software out there. However I am still very interested in seeing this bluetooth piece work. Is there any more info on this?...I will continue to search for more threads so pardon me if more info on the status is posted somewhere else...I put in for a pre-order of the dongle (which I assume is still planning on coming out sooner than later) I also plan on trying for the Beta if that is still active. Bluetooth has never been an easy technology to get to work for a large array of phones, especially when you are asking your software to go and get as much data and control from the device as possible. Good luck in finishing this up.