I’ve spent the last few days researching car kit solutions for the iphone 4. On long journeys, i’ll typically have my sat nav on all the time which doubles as a handsfree kit as it’s bluetooth enabled. However that’s not ideal…
For starters i have to mute the stereo, then unmute the sat nav to take a call. Takes a few seconds but it’s all hassle. I can’t charge my iphone 4 either in the car. I could get a car charger to usb converter but let’s face it, that looks messy. More cables on show never looks good.
So i wanted some sort of integrated set up that would charge the phone, work through the car’s speakers and also play music. Remember the iphone 4 is like an ipod only it’s a phone too 😉 So it makes sense to take advantage of it’s music capabilities.
Ideally, i don’t want to have to buy a new stereo, there’s nothing wrong with the existing one only it doesn’t do what i want it to do 🙂 After some investigation, i found out my stereo is a Panasonic PACR02.
‘Connects2‘ are a company that specialize in this sort of ipod/iphone adapter stuff and it seems as though this will work with the iphone and my stereo (with just another adapter at the end). I’m waiting on confirmation it works with the iphone 4 as i know it works with the iphone 3gs. I should be able to fit it myself too which is an added bonus.
All of this works out cheaper than buying a new stereo although i did see some pretty cool stereos on my travels. My favorites were these two;
So we’ve gone from radios, to tapes, to cds, to ipods…. where to next for car stereos? Will they soon be grabbing music from the cloud?!