Gadgetory

it's the end of an era it's the last episode of seen at roadside assistance episode number 49 for Thursday March 29th 2012 so close to 50 yet so so very far not quite a year not quite a year I'm antuan goodwin alongside Wayne Cunningham with Mitchell Chang on the controls and is the show where we take a minute to answer a couple of your emails and we've got a couple of them this week that I think are worth sort of mentioning so let's start with the first one this one comes in from Don and Pittsburgh e says hello I listen to your show and they're great but i just wanted to email you concerning a gentleman you contacted concerning the jeep radio Jeep Wrangler radio install one of the problems was installing the aftermarket radio and the the Wrangler which uses a high-speed canbus electrical system he says actually most Mopar vehicles have this so when you buy an adapter you need to buy another adapter for the electrical system so that it all functions normally this can cause a lot of problems with the the vehicles I guess electrical systems when you don't use this adapter so the part that done recommended to our previous listener with the Jeep Wrangler is PA see as the company and they have a part called the c2 R dash C hy for it's a seventy dollar adapter that you install in the jeep wrangler that basically takes over and it allows the standards dairy that the new stereo that you install in the wrangler to work without interfering or causing issues with that sort of high-speed can bus system that's in the in the vehicle did you find that adapter like I'm Crutchfield or something I just google it yeah I'm pretty sure yeah you could probably find it at any sort of like 12 volt shop so or 12 volt supplier Crutchfield I guess being at the top of my list I actually found it on amazon or you can order directly from pack i do PA SI audio IC yeah i'm looking at the Crutchfield list here and they got a lot of stuff listed for PA see so noise filters even an iPod adapter USB extension cable satellite radio adapters all sorts of stuff sorry because what happens is like a lot of D the stereo in in the sort of chrysler vehicles actually does an interesting thing all of those doors ajar chimes you left your keys in the car chimes those come through the speakers right instead of a discrete sort of like speaker in the dashboard and so what happens is when you take the stock stereo out you lose all of that so if your car has memory seats the regular doesn't but you actually lose the ability to store the the memory settings for your seats the car just goes holy crap a part of my brains missing it affect it out so although not having those chives and stuff i wouldn't mind not having so the problem is not having those chimes there you know could you know it could be something like you know your the light's not coming on when you leave a door partially unlocked and it'd be an issue when you get an accident or I mean it could just be something whereas if the car doesn't get a signal that it's supposed to get it just throws an error code and causes all sorts of other problems it's kind of like you know you leave your fuel your fuel door off and you get a check engine light because your car thinks oh no there's not a vacuum on the fuel system the car must be about to explode and it freaks out over something small yeah the so yeah a lot of head units these days do connect to your your vehicle systems a little more integrated than in the past have you encountered this much when you've been swapping out stereos and oh you know we have the aveo so it's literally the dumbest car yeah in the in the history of vehicles the 2004 early two thousand seven chevy aveo this thing doesn't even have power windows so it's pretty easy to slap any stereo in there the problem comes when you start trying to do you know obd diagnostic stuff because that generation of the aveo actually doesn't output everything that that some of the systems look for CAD not non-standard or obd2 right I guess yeah but yeah other the vehicle we talked about this before with Honda's where it's just like you take your stereo out and the the security system freaks out yeah so you know definitely a good tip from dawn for all of our artists a chrysler jeep for drivers this next email comes in from doug roads i think it's actually hilarious he says hey car tech guys since you've been talking about phone and car mounts lately on roadside assistance i highly recommend highly recommend the twenty-dollar CD slot universal mount from mountain calm about one a few months ago on amazon.com and it works great with my iphone 4s using ways and rhapsody in my chevy HHR with a 12 volt USB adapter in a five dollar Alex out he says that it works great in rental cars and several people have seen mine and have also ordered one he also states he doesn't work for mount tech but he's just sharing a cool product I like this one this is funny yeah this is the equivalent like sitting your coffee cup on an open cd-rom tray yeah this is a yeah slides into the CD slot that you're probably not using anymore because you have an ipod tooked up to your system trying to find a good image of it here actually i just googled it here's that one that's not bad actually just almost lost okay let me see if we can find that photo again because it's it's kind of funny yeah so this has a bracket that slides into your CD slot mmm one thing i was wondering about this is what does your CD player do does it go like oh my god i need to play i need to play cuz something's you know I've got a CD in me it looks like if you look at the other photos like it doesn't go all the way in like it it has sort of in like a little bit of an upturned lip and so it may be just kind of grabs on to the inside of the the CD slot without actually going all the way in and triggering the sort of like arms that let the CD player know there's a disc in there otherwise you would totally tear up your 6-disc in-dash change or if you had one of those oh yeah does it be constantly spinning motors and like that and I think it's just a case of like the product just kind of grabbing on to a lip that live happens to be the CD slot not necessarily like there's a gigantic fake plastic CD in there like the tape adapters yeah that's used to see that this is good in some cars although some cars will have the radio display below the CD player and so the phone and braca blend of blocking that so you don't really want to do that it looks like he actually has a picture of his HHR here but yeah it looks like yeah you probably would definitely end up blocking the display but if you're using an auxiliary input that display and show anything anyway so that's Tris just showing aux-in so who cares if you block it yeah all you really need is volume controls and you should probably be doing that with your steering wheel controls if they're available so but yeah that's actually a very cool product that I laughed at at first but kind of makes a little bit of sense especially if you're going to be going from car to car because most cars have a CD slot in them yeah and as opposed to suction cup in something to the windshield which you know you have to reach all the way forward and do that or there's other mounts that I'll like mount in the cup holders to which going to depends on the height and the placement of the cup holders I think cup holder mounts are cool yeah de pit yet but depending on where your cup holders are if you have like a like a Porsche and you have those weird like flip out that holders that you know don't really lock into place or a BMW has those weird like clip-on cupholders you can snap onto the z4 not gonna work but pretty much every other car that's old America is like 15 cup holders in it though so you always find something conveniently placed I actually usually just toss my phone in the cup holder just by itself yeah I did that get phone in the cup holder yes I'm bluetooth and and I don't charge my phone in the car yeah cup holder it's actually the key holder and the phone holder and the everything else I really except drinks yeah goes in the cup holder so that's interesting but yeah thanks for that Doug we've got another email that comes in from mr uh who sent this from his droid razr he said on a recent episode you were giving options for seven passenger s SUV at around 30k with good Kevin teka fuel mileage why not the kia sorento probably a lot cheaper than the explorer definitely a lot cheaper than the Highlander Hybrid which can probably cannot be had for under 40 the hilar driver can be had for around 40 the correct i was actually looking at the prices yeah than that but yeah the cerritos a good option there's never is that a that is a s 7 passengers in I think the Sorrento has a full down rear seat yeah I wouldn't want to sit back there um actually take a look at it right here let me just find some photos of it here see if they have pictures of the rear seats awhile since I've been in a store in Tara yeah they were oh yeah here we go here's a picture that shows that there is a there's a third row seating area the side of the car should open up like that because yeah getting back there otherwise you're not getting into that sir it's cruel the third row looks very cruel oh yeah I mean hildren go back there they don't have legs I'm not all the time cuz you have to put a car seat there there's no way of course you could fit in the back there I guess yeah this is one of those things out to get back here you have to fold down the middle row seats and climb over and it seemed like maybe it'd be easier to get in through the hatch it could that's how whenever we take pictures of cars and you see me in the third row I've usually climbed in through the hatch and then flip the seat up behind me that's the only easy way to get in yeah yeah definitely don't want to be putting a grown man back there yeah this is fairly typical and of course with the third row up in the Sorento you can't it you don't have much cargo space you get a very slim little bit of area there yeah pretty sure that the the Highlanders probably about the same yeah it's one of those situations where you're just you if you're gonna make the Costco run you leave two kids at home right you set them up with the ps3 and walk away mm-hmm so yeah there's that it's a good option I don't remember this window being particularly offensive I just did pop into mind when we're talking about this yeah let me just one last thing check check the price on the weather they sell these things for it looks like base 23 is the low shouldn't go in for that's a 2.4 liter though automatic transmission thinning view all the way up to a 34 thousand dollar car so yeah cheaper then some of the other options certainly right so yeah I'm pretty sure we probably missed five other vehicles yeah they're kind of fit into into that class but I guess the thing is that though the car that that we think is the best is usually the one that pops straight in mind so there you go we got another question one last question actually from from Keith who's actually sent us a couple of emails of four he says a couple of weeks ago we mentioned the tomtom car dock in the iphone 3gs and he has a couple of problems related to it he says first periodically he can't get his phone to pair with the tomtom dock until he goes into the settings and bluetooth menu and tries to pair it and the second is he's been getting an annoying message on his phone that says that this device is not supported but most of the time it's fine and basically he wants to know why these things happen well I've certainly seen the phone is not supported message from different different devices lots of times ipod integration in in cars I've seen that happen before it's just yeah the vehicle was set up a certain amount of software with the circular software don't looks and checks the the phone and you know maybe it's not it doesn't realize oh you've updated the the you know the software in the phone for example or the phone company has so it might see that and go like oh I don't work with you you know because they'd have an updated the software in the car the interesting thing is usually just you can just push past that yeah and just keep it a little work fine yeah Frank yeah frankly I've ignored that message many times and yet had no problem with the phone you're working with a car right it with the tomtom dock it kind of seems like it's there it's a handshake issue because you have two things that are happening the first is that you know the phone's not pairing straight off and then the second thing is that it's showing device doesn't support so what I'm thinking is you know either there is another Bluetooth device in the area that the phones trying to talk to also that there's maybe a little bit of lag in the tomtom device actually powering up when you get into the car and crank your ignition and maybe the iphones already passed the handshake point in that pairing before the tom thumb goes like oh yeah I'm here it could be any number of issues but the fact of the matter is the iphone 3gs and the the tomtom car kit of the the generation that the iphone 3gs are they just the Bluetooth at that point in history just wasn't great it was good but it wasn't the you know the easy pairing you know Bluetooth portato stuff that we're seeing now yeah there's some updates in the software to like Apple did update to iOS iOS 5.1 i think it is now and they did do some improvements to some of the Bluetooth I've noticed in that actually not not huge improvements and it might not affect the pairing at all but certainly when with bluetooth audio is streaming it's better at showing track information for example right but I can't make the Bluetooth chip do something I couldn't do yeah or you know so if there is a you know like a fast fast pairing I remember what exactly that protocol is called but it's a simple pairing protocol spp if that's not supported by the phone and if it's not supported by the device is trying to pair two and sometimes you kind of run into those sort of handshake issues and I mean it did see it you could pop into the settings hit the power button and it figures it out I have the same issue on my on my handset a droid HTC Thunderbolt Android Thunderbolt phone but that's mostly because at any given time there like 15 devices that I'm paired to in five cars that haven't been in the garage for months and so I have to periodically go into my settings and clear those out completely different issue from the one that you're probably having and I have to admit that I'm also a little head scratchy over the the device does not support but it sounds like yeah when you you've got the experience with that and it's probably harmless yeah yeah usually it's just yeah the phone doesn't think it does because it's not recognizing something or the cars direct or you know the docs not recognizing you know something i would think it's strange that was the same software setup it's periodically happening that seems odd but you know if it works it works so he had easy to enough to ignore that right guy I do remember at about the time I was testing the cut the you know the tomtom car dock I would get the same issue with the you know plugging the ipod touch in the car kids where it would go like sorry and will support this and I'd go that's nice I play the music please yeah and they would just do it so it's prob just some sort of weird works with ipod authentication sort of thing that's happening abscess some film programmer at some programmer at Apple was probably thinking it looks better to cover our butt and say this device isn't officially supported than to give someone an excuse to complain about something it doesn't work right anyway i hope that kind of helps you out we didn't give you any answers there but we did kind of explain why things suck yeah this is probably the best that we can hope to do in that case right there so but that pretty much rounds up the the emails that we have to answer this week on the last episode of the last very short episode of cnet roadside assistance but as you can still continue to send them in to us you can send your emails to our tech at cnet com and we'll still answer them maybe just not in a podcast format so you can do that and it's been great answering your emails fielding your questions getting your voicemails and interacting with all of you guys on Twitter and in the chat room on the show so that's it show's over you