Versatile Smartphone Dock Offers Three Functions in One [REVIEW]

This unusual device functions as a cellphone dock, a Bluetooth speaker, and a Bluetooth handset that lets your cellphone act like a landline phone. Here’s our review.

The MoshiMoshi04 Bluetooth Speaker-Handset

The MoshiMoshi04 Bluetooth Speaker-Handset by Native Union works with any Bluetooth-equipped mobile device. It has a silver-colored receiver, festooned with a honeycomb motif and measuring a couple of inches longer than typical telephone handsets.

That handset rests on its base that as well functions as a dock. Once you place the handset on the dock, it touches contacts that charge its battery. In the same fashion, when we plugged our iPhone 4 into the dock, it charged that as then. Overall, this device, designed by UK-born Michael Young, looks completely original, unlike any dock we’ve ever seen.

What the MoshiMoshi04 does best

Let’s start out with what the MoshiMoshi04 does best: It’s an excellent iPhone dock and Bluetooth speaker. Once you’ve charged up the handset, it serves as a portable pair of great-sounding speakers, capably playing whatever audio your mobile device feeds to it. Because of the two speakers’ diminutive size, its bass response isn’t going to rock the house, nevertheless even when it’s on battery power, it sounds surprisingly good.

It’s easy to pair up your Bluetooth device with the MoshiMoshi04. With our iPhone, it acted just like any other Bluetooth gadget, where you put the MoshiMoshi04 into pairing mode, find it in the appropriate iPhone menu, and the two devices recognize each other from at that time on. It can as well be paired with a Bluetooth-equipped laptop, and from there you can use the handset to talk on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) connections just as Skype.

The speakers

If you’re listening to music from your iPhone on the speakers and a phone call comes in, it behaves properly, fading down the music during you answer the phone. Working like a landline phone, when you pick up the handset from its cradle, you can begin talking without pushing any buttons.

Sound quality as a telephone handset is excellent, nevertheless we did have a problem with each of the two cellphones with which we tested it: Though the calls sounded excellent from the MoshiMoshi04, when talking from the other end, we could hear a slight echo at the end of a spoken sentence or phrase. In some instances this was distracting, during in other cases it was subtle, yet it was on the whole there, and you might find it annoying. Strangely enough, that echoing characteristic was not as noticeable when we used it in speakerphone mode, which worked so then.

The bad news

Here’s the bad news: It’s priced at a steep $200, a number that will probably give you sticker shock. Nevertheless if you’re looking for a way to minimize your exposure to cellphone radiation, and would like an unusual cellphone dock that as well functions as a pleasant-sounding Bluetooth speaker and gives you a landline-like wireless handset, the MoshiMoshi04 might be worth a try.

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