Parrot MK6100 Bluetooth Car Kit with Steering Wheel Control (Black)

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by: Melody Mcmanus (United States)
on: Wednesday, 21-January-2009

Great Unit paired right up with my Verizon Blackberry and Dare. Easy install used plug and play harness from [...] I used the plug in Mic supplied the sound was much better. The Radio sound is great and so far no one has had a problem hearing me they all say I sound crystal clear.

by: SCW (LA, CA)
on: Thursday, 6-November-2008

Ive had this installed in my car for about 2 months now and overall am very pleased with it. I wanted a bluetooth kit that would not only let me make calls but also let me play music from my phone without having to plug it in and this accomplishes that quite well. Overall Id say its a great product with a few flaws that annoy me on an almost daily basis, but that Ive pretty much gotten over (though I cant make sense of some of these design decisions - hasnt Parrot been making these for a while?)

1. The screensaver - theres a screensaver that comes on for seemingly no reason other than to distract you while youre trying to look at the road. Its just a bouncing bluetooth logo that you have to press a button on the remote to get rid of, usually resulting in the system performing some unintended action when all you wanted to do was make the screensaver go away so you could see your signal strength and/or battery life.

2. Audio muting - it seems a little aggressive on the audio muting. For some reason it seems to insist upon muting your system for about 3 seconds when it connects to your phone and also any time you get a text message, even though...

3. No text display - it doesnt display texts on the screen. You just have to infer that you got one by the fact that it muted the audio for a few seconds and then pick up your phone and check it. Lame. I swear other bluetooth kits can do this...

4. No track info display - this one is certainly more annnoying that I thought. Again, you have to pick up your phone to see what track is playing (although thankfully you can control playback from the remote).

5. Doesnt work well with polarized sunglasses - (starting to dig here) If youve seen a display that gets all screwy when youre wearing polarized sunglasses, then you know what I mean. Im just mentioning this because a lot of people wear them while driving and Parrot designs a lot of car kits, so you think they would have designed with this in mind. Or not...

6. The remote - while I havent had any of the breakage or short battery life issues that other people have, I am surprised at how poor the remote mounting system is - and by system I mean a cheap plastic band that is way too huge for just about any steering wheel. I mounted mine on the thickest part of my wheel and had to use the tightest setting on the mounting band. I know Sony has been making wheel-mounted remotes for its car stereos for years that have much better attachment systems than this. Come on Parrot!

Overall, Id say if youre considering, its either this or the Bluetouch at like 2-3x the price. Overall a great system, so much so that Ive been considering getting an iPhone if and only if they add stereo bluetooth because Id miss being able to use my MK6100 too much if I switched.

by: S. Carr (Boulder, CO)
on: Wednesday, 1-October-2008

In early September 2008, I had the Parrot MK6100 Bluetooth Car Kit installed by the Best Buy installers for $79 on my BMW 740 iL. Either the installers or the Kit had limitations in that the system could only be hooked up to the front speakers instead of all 6 speakers, leaving my MP3 player music using the Parrot less than optimum sound (in fact, sounding tinny in just the two speakers). This may be a limitation of the installers, although I checked with another installation company and also with the local BMW dealer and they both confirmed that it would cost between $400-$600 to make the requisite changes to the BMW system to allow the Parrot to use all of the speakers in my car, because of the limitations of the Parrot MK6100. I dont know whether this is true or if they just saw an opportunity to charge more. In any event, I didnt think it was worth it for just the improved sounds for the MP3 player; and, in addition, my son has a connection appliance for his iPod that he has installed in the cassette player drawer in his Audi that allows the iPod to have full access to all of its speakers, so Im hoping that I can purchase this appliance and have it work with my ATT Tilt smart phone for the MP3 feature (which, unfortunately, means that the Parrot did not perform as I expected for this function. As to the Parrot features independent of the speaker/quality sound issues for the MP3 player, I have found that it is slow to recognize the MP3 player feature of my ATT Tilt smart phone and sometimes it requires re-synching the two. In addition, the call out feature of the phone feature is not synched up for voice only commands and the push button approach to dial a number is not what I would normally want out of a remote, hands free, voice-activated system, which I had with my previous Cellport system. This may be my lack of knowledge in how to use the Parrot. The Cellport system came with a CD to instruct the use on how to use its features, and the Parrot comes with a printed play book which is cumbersome to use. Because I havent used the Parrot for phone calls and generally just have used it for playing songs from the MP3 player feature of my ATT Tilt, Im OK with the Parrot and certainly prefer it to my earbud or to holding the ATT Tilt to my ear while driving, but its NOT the A+ standard that I would like to see, and for phone calls, it doesnt measure up with the now out of date and probably no longer available Cellport (which was before bluetooth).