Review: iLane

Respond to emails while you drive using only your voice with iLane

Do you text while you drive? C’mon be honest. Truth is many people do, whether they admit to it or not. Now a Canadian company feels it has found a way to get people’s eyes off their cell phones and back on the road — with iLane.

When paired up with a cell phone, iLane will allow users to listen to, delete, even respond to emails in their vehicles without using their hands…only their voice. Sound too good to be true? Read on…

Getting Started

You will need to setup an online account with iLane to get things started. This is basically to tell iLane which email account it should pull your email from. Once that is done, you will need to install a small application to your phone. Finally you’ll have to sync up iLane to your phone and Headset. It’s all done through Bluetooth. While my Blackberry had no trouble finding the included Bluetooth headset, it did have trouble syncing up with iLane. After fiddling around for about 10 minutes I finally got a connection and I was ready to test it out.

Features

Once you are up and running everything relies on voice commands. Want to check your email? Simply say “check messages. ” iLane will read your email to you. To delete a message…say “delete.” To forward an email…say “forward.” You get the gist. You have the option of sending or forwarding emails to anyone in your contact ist by saying their name or by saying a phone number.

Once iLane has read an email to you, simply say “compose email” or “reply” and iLane will record a voice message and save it as an MP3 file. That file will then be sent out as an attachment. Now here’s the catch. Whoever you send the “email” to must have a cell phone that can play MP3 files. If their phone does not support MP3′s…then they will not be able to listen to your email.

You can do more then just deal with emails on the road. iLane will also let you to respond to sms messages (text messages). This is done through voice as well. Other features include checking your calendar, and listening to news headlines and weather updates. News is broken down into general, sports, business, technology and entertainment. Each category has 4 to 5 headlines. These headlines seem to refresh once a day. As for the weather updates, they seem to be quite accurate and easy to access. Just say “check weather” and iLane will spew out the 3 day outlook for whatever city you choose. You MUST pay a $8 monthly fee to enable the news and weather updates.

Limitations

While iLane works fairly well for the most part, I couldn’t help but feel some frustration at times. Syncing up iLane to my phone and the Bluetooth headset became problematic. When you leave your vehicle iLane is supposed to go into sleep mode. When you come back iLane is supposed to sense the Bluetooth headset and wake up so it’s ready for use. This never happened for me. In fact every time I left my vehicle I had to re-sync my phone and Bluetooth headset to iLane. iLane always had trouble finding my phone and it often would take up to 10 minutes for me to get connected again. It got to the point where I would leave my phone and Bluetooth headset in the vehicle so they would not lose the connection. I checked my phone to see if a setting was the issue but I was never able to figure it out. Painful!

The voice recognition software doesn’t seem to have any major issues understanding your basic commands. The key here is to use the exact commands. If you say Check email…iLane may not understand the command. Thankfully a cheat sheet is included with the device to get you acquainted with the commands.

I also want to point out iLane does not work with all cell phones. Currently only Blackberries (8000 series and newer) work with the device. They also must have OS 4.1 or higher. Intelligent Mechatronic Systems, the company behind iLane, says more phones will be supported in the near future.

Bottom line

For the most part iLane does work, but it does have its share of problems. Price is one of the biggest. At $599 its quite expensive. The fact that the voice recognition system is not perfect and the syncing was a continuous problem kind of turned me off. For $599 the bugs should be all worked out and it should be near flawless. Bottom line, it does work…if you have patience and take the time to learn the commands and get to know all of iLane’s quirks. If you expect everything to work perfectly out of the box…iLane may not be for you.

The Good:

Listen, delete, respond to emails using only your voice
Allows you to keep your eyes on the road
News headlines and weather on demand
Software updates available free of charge

The Bad:

Expensive at $599
Monthly fees to unlock news and weather features
Voice recognition system not perfect
Experienced issues with syncing
Will not work will all smartphones (Only newer Blackberry phones)
Sends outgoing emails as MP3′s, not in text form