Review: the Nokia PPH-1 hands-free car kit

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2004. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

I have for some time thought driving while on my phone dangerous. Strangely for someone so into IT and gadgets, I don’t like mobile phones and rarely use them. Some might say this is because I don’t have any friends; I would argue it’s because I spend most of my life answering emails - I like not being available. Unfortunately, I do have to be contactable for the surgery when out and about for emergency visits and the like.

Recent legislation that came into force on 1st December 2003 has made it a specific offence to drive while on the phone, and a recent item on the national news showed one police force stating that it was time to stop warning offenders and start penalising them. The penalty is a fixed £30 fine, or up to £1,000 on conviction in court.

Obviously the two main solutions are not to use your phone while driving, or to have an in-car hands-free system. However, it must be stated that drivers still risk prosecution (for failure to have proper control) if they use hands-free phones when driving, though pushing buttons on a phone while it is in a cradle or on the steering wheel is not covered by the new offence, provided you don’t hold the phone.

Of interest to general practices that employ staff who do visits is that the Department for Transport in its guidance suggests that employers would probably be liable if they required their employees to use a hand-held phone while driving, and might also be liable if they failed to forbid employees to use such phones on company business. Having a policy that all staff either have a hands-free kit or don’t answer the phone whilst driving, and publicising it, would seem sensible.

Not answering my phone while driving has, however, never seemed to work for me. This is partly because I have known it take more than half an hour for a message left on my mobile answerphone to get to my phone. In the meantime my receptionists seem to get increasingly desperate to contact me if I don’t answer or ring them back straight away, and I have ended up with messages left at every house I was due to visit and on my home answerphone in case I was sloping off home.

Being a cheapskate and not wanting to pay for a major installed in-car system, I purchased, a couple of years ago, a cheap all-in-one cradle and charger that my phone sat in. In theory there was a speaker so that when a call came in you could hear the call, and if you shouted loud enough the caller could hear you. Although it worked very well for a couple of months, it started working only intermittently. This was probably due to the fact it was only £10, and it became more dangerous to whip the phone out of the cradle and put it to my ear when it stopped working.

I then bought a Nokia PPH-1 for my Nokia phone, though there are similar things available for other phones. This is essentially the same idea as my cheap cradle, but of a higher quality. There is a large speaker attached to a car lighter plug that plugs into the lighter socket, so installation is easy. There is a long flexible cable that plugs into the phone, and if you don’t want to use the phone microphone there is an optional microphone that plugs into the speaker and can be stuck onto the dashboard in an appropriate place.

This has been working fine now for over a year. The quality of the sound is very impressive, and people have always heard me OK even though I only use the phone’s microphone.

At some point I am thinking of changing to a Bluetooth phone, and instead of wearing a silly headset I believe they do a similar speaker but without the cable. This would mean that whenever I was in range it would work and wouldn’t require plugging in. Although this sounds like laziness, my general lack of wanting to use the phone has meant that I have on occasion forgotten to plug it in, and ended up having to pull up to find my phone in my jacket on the back seat.