Asteroid
Been driving around with the Asteroid for a while now and it's a pretty neat radio but not perfect.
Building it into the car was a breeze. With the radio came all the needed cables, like a 3,5mm jack, iPod cable, USB cable for usb-sticks, GPS dongle and microphone for the carkit. All cables were pretty long so you should have no problem routing them to whatever place you want them in your car.
Soundquality is pretty good and there are plenty of connections for subwoofers and external amplifiers so it should suffice even for cars with loads of fat speakers.
Connecting my phone, an HTC Desire with CyanogenMod 7.1 (nightly build), was easy through bluetooth and streaming music over bluetooth went without problems. Answering phonecalls and navigating the menu is pretty easy.
A few problems I ran into though. To use internet on the radio (for google maps, internet radio, coyote speed camera alerts) you can either use a 3g USB dongle (which costs you at least 10€ a month where I live) or tether your phone through bluetooth (maybe usb works, haven't tried yet). To do this, your phone needs to support the bluetooth DUN profile which android lacks. Nokia phones should be no problem though. I've tried using 3rd party apps like PDANet but to no avail.
Furthermore I found that the device lacks some tweaking capabilities. For example, when i'm navigating my contacts from my phone, the device tries to "read" the contacts for me using text-to-speech. I've found no way to turn this off. Furthermore I could find no option in the settings to turn off the traffic announcements from radio. The device now switches to radio when i'm listening to music from my SD card to bring me the traffic information (Which can be skipped by pressing the "back" button). Finally, the device came with a Dutch language setting and i've found no way to turn this to English, which is the language I prefer.
Please note, I have only used this radio for a short while and I might've missed some things! I think this is a very nice radio though and since it is the first model and only out for a week or so now I think there will be some updates from Parrot's side, perhaps expanding the capabilities of this device. The only major drawback is the lack of internet connectivity if you have an Android phone. This is not Parrot's fault though but rather Google's. I heard though that Honeycomb supports Bluetooth PAN and I think the Asteroid supports this for Internet tethering so i'm keeping my hopes up for Android Icecream to bring this feature to my phone.
Pro:
- Lots sources for music: Radio, USB stick, SD Card, iPod, 3.5mm Jack line-in
- Android with Google Maps
- Speed camera Alerts
- Large screen (for a single DIN radio unit)
- Lots of cables came with the Radio (With a Pioneer your need to buy overpriced iPod cables separately)
- Its a handsfree carkit, and Parrot knows how to make those by now
- Lots of tweaking possible with the sound
Con:
- Internet does not work with Android phones (yet)
- Lacks certain tweaking possibilities in the settings menu
Feel free to ask any questions