I was given a Toyota Corolla as a loaner for a few weeks while my car was being worked on, and have to turn it in and get my car back. Good! But I want to remove all the addresses I entered in the GPS navigational nav system. How do I delete all the previous destinations?
My expensive Toyota Highlander has a problem, and it’s one that’s bugged me for a long time: I paid the extra thousands of dollars for the high-end navigational system and hands-free Bluetooth cell phone speaker system, and while I love the nav system, the cellphone support is pretty awful. No it doesn’t display caller ID when a call comes in. No it won’t let me copy my phonebook — or even my ten favorite numbers — onto the system, but the kicker is that when I use the hands-free system, at least 50% of the time the person on the other end complains about how hard it is to hear and understand what I’m saying.
I called Toyota and asked if there’s an upgrade path for the microphone. I’d pay $100-$200 to have a really high quality mic with noise reduction system hanging from my visor, but there’s nothing. No upgrade path at all. Tough luck. Even third party solutions – of which there are quite a few – basically involve completely rewiring my dashboard and hooking the unit in as an external audio subsystem. And costs hundreds of dollars just to install.
Enter a category of Bluetooth devices called “in-car speakerphones”. The idea is that these are self-contained speaker, mic and Bluetooth devices that let you sidestep the entire car audio system, and since they’re generally designed to clip onto your sun visor, they’re just inches from your mouth and should be clear when used hands free too.
SuperTooth sent us one of their new Crystal units, remarkably priced at about $70 on Amazon.com, and from everything I can tell, it’s a big improvement on my far more expensive Toyota system.
