One thing I've noticed is that women are far less likely than men to use hands-free devices. I noticed this all the time when I lived downstate. Men usually had some sort of headset or earpiece, whereas women were usually holding the handset to their ears.
I noticed Karen was pretty bad about it, too. For years I offered to put a high quality speakerphone in her vehicles, etc... she didn't like turning them on, charging them, etc.
Recently her factory Ford/Pioneer high end stereo in the Lincoln LT decided to have its 6-CD changer crap out. Researching fixes, I found that they all eventually do it, and in-dash changers are ultra-prone to death. Vibration, too small an area for the mechanism, no easy way to design it into the deck where you can get at the mechanism to maintain it, etc. Almost no one does in-dash changers anymore. Plus living at the end of two miles of washboarded dirt roads didn't help, I'm sure.
A few weeks before that happened I had replaced the stock stereo in the Subaru with a cheap Kenwood deck. I was very impressed with the Bluetooth speaker phone and mic built in and found that Kenwood decided (smartly) to not build their own Bluetooth. They bought the technology from Parrot, a very popular and high quality noise canceling BT headset company. Very smart.
So we went back and got her a Kenwood. Great BT and built in Garmin Nuvi. The deck mutes for BT calls and partially or fully mutes (option in the menu) for GPS announcements. The deck also automatically pairs with any phones it knows about when you get in the vehicle and does seem to be good about not trying to connect at long ranges if you leave the deck on and get out of the vehicle. I think it's this last feature that really fixed the non-use.
No charging, no messing around. You get in and the phone attaches to the deck and the audio quality in both directions from the vehicle speakers and a remote mic mounted on the roof near the center of the windshield is stellar. No noise, works great. Any time I call her and she's in the truck, I can tell she's on the handsfree now.
Kenwood not only integrated the Parrot but they gave full control over the mic gain and three levels of noise cancellation. That's a tinkerer's dream. I played around and found the mic gain to be too high in my setup and too low in hers. With a little tweaking, it's even harder to notice we are in the vehicles.
Soooo... It may not be a gender thing. It may be a "not willing to screw around with tech that makes using it harder than it should be" thing.
I liked the darn thing so much, I had one installed in my truck, too. I've asked people if they could tell I was in the diesel with the window open (very loud Cummins 5.9L engine). They say if I hadn't mentioned it, they wouldn't have thought about it. The Parrot noise-cancellation is that good. My mic is also mounted at the top of the outer pillar on the driver's side so that is an awful place for the "window open diesel test".
Kenwood does make a deck that will log into Facebook and read you posts. Hahaha. That's utterly ridiculous. No. We didn't do it.
Oh, these decks will play DVDs. That's also silly, but I did buy a $5 used copy of Disney's Planes and loaded it in mine, just for when I have to sit in the truck and wait for something. Haha. I suppose the video output and ability to play two sources is really the way to use the DVD for folks with kids... Put a monitor in the back for the rug rats... We obviously didn't install that option.
We also didn't install backup cameras but I'll probably do that later. The decks will do that and can be set up with reverse switch triggering to go to the video input.
Puuuurty fancy. But the low end Kenwood had all the nice Bluetooth stuff also. $150 and free installation with factory/stock speakers. Very cheap if it gets someone to use handsfree and not be messing with the phone.
Long commutes are already a dumb tax traffic tickets just make it dumber. If people stop driving states would go broke. Oh wait people are stopping driving or young people just aren't starting. Good for them.
