Sling music from cellphone to car stereo, wirelessly

If you use an iPod exclusively for your music fix, you've long had a number of options for getting your tunes from your gadget to your car radio, thanks to the mountain of FM transmitters available that plug into your iPod's dock connector. But what if you, like a growing number of drivers, are stashing music on your cell phone? Few phones have FM transmitter attachments available (not counting the iPhone, of course), so how does one get music from cell phone to stereo?

The answer: The miracle of Bluetooth. No longer just for those geeky headsets, new devices are coming on the market that make it possible to get music from any cell phone on your car stereo. I've spent a week trying just such a device, the Venturi Mini, and it works pretty well on the whole.

The Venturi Mini plugs into your cigarette lighter and instantly powers on whenever you're driving. Pairing it with your cell phone via Bluetooth is also pretty simple, and the Mini handles playback for you: Just start up whatever playlist you like on your phone, and the Mini goes to work; you never really need to think about your phone again or even take it out of your pocket when you hop in the car! (If your car radio supports it, it will also display the name of the track you're playing; mine doesn't.)

The hard part is the same as it is for most FM transmitters: Finding a suitable station to use that isn't already taken. (In the middle of San Francisco, that isn't easy.) Eventually I settled on one abandoned part of the dial but still I get static on certain stretches of road when a far-off transmitter takes over.

The controls on the Venturi Mini aren't the best I've encountered. Crude backlights make the music/phone/play/stop icons hard to make out unless you're at the perfect angle, and the scrollwheel system is touchy. To skip to the next track, for example, you just spin the dial down, but I often find myself accidentally spinning it backwards, too, leaving me back at the beginning of the song I just tried to skip. A bigger concern is the phone operation: The Mini works as a hands-free device for your phone, too, giving you theoretically simple speakerphone operation through its built-in microphone. That didn't work too well for me, as no one could ever hear what I was saying unless I screamed at the top of my lungs. When calls did come in, I found I ultimately had to unplug the Mini and fish the phone out of my pocket in order to answer them.

Still, for its music features alone, I found the Mini a useful gadget that I will probably keep using for the long term. $129 is a bit pricey, considering that iPod FM transmitters can be had for $30 and the phone component is so rough, but if you don't take a lot of phone calls in the car, the Mini is just so easy to use and good at getting music from your pocket to your stereo that it's hard not to love at any price.