Khoji On Tech (and more)

I just got a nifty little gadget from Gear4 called the BluEye that adds Bluetooth, an FM radio and a wired remote to my iPod Touch and effectively transforms it into a phone with voice dialing. When calls come in anything playing on the Touch is automatically paused and you accept the call by pressing Play on the remote. If your phone supports voice dialing you can use that too, you just press the Bluetooth button on the remote once and speak the name to dial. This means that you can leave the phone in your pocket pretty much all the time and you don’t miss calls because you’re listening to your iPod. You also have the added advantage of the wired remote, so you can pause, skip tracks and adjust the volume without having to futz around with the touchscreen.

It works very well once you’ve downloaded the special firmware version for the Touch from the manufacturer’s site. The only gotcha is that you need a Windows computer for the firmware installer — I did it on a normal PC, I wasn’t willing to risk any glitches on Parallels or Fusion so I didn’t try that.

There are a couple of features that work on normal iPods that are not yet working on the Touch, specifically everything to do with displaying text on the iPod screen. This means that you don’t see the FM radio stations and frequencies and also don’t get the display of the last nine numbers called for selection with the Next and Previous buttons on the remote. I can live without those at the moment, however, and I can imagine that it will be fixed with a firmware update. Overall I’m extremely satisfied with it, and the call quality is as good as any other Bluetooth headset I’ve used.

Highly recommended.