Parrot is a 20 year old company based in Paris, France with a wide range of products under its belt. It began in the 1990s making PDAs, and then transitioned to voice recognition devices for inside your car. Since then its made everything from drones to headphones. Today at CES it showed off its newest concept for enhancing your car’s smarts, the very industrial sounding RNB6, which will no doubt be replaced when its ready to go on sale.
The RNB6 is a 2-DIN unit that comes with a gorgeous 7-inch 720p “IPS Pro” touchscreen, along with a 4 x 55-watt audio amplifier and a wired wide-angle 1080p dash cam (with “Super HDR”). The device runs on a slightly customized Android 5.0 that offers media playback, navigation, telephony, dash cam, air control, parking assistance and on-board diagnostics (for tire pressure, parking sensors, air-conditioning and more); as well as voice control for some of these features. Depending on the type of phone you plug in, the RNB6 can also toggle Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to let you control your phone via its own touchscreen.
One other impressive feature here is that like Parrot’s audio products, the RNB6 lets you adjust the sound stage inside the car, so that when the driver is by him or herself, the music can be set to sound as if you’re sat in the middle instead of off-center. Parrot even offers some presets for certain car models for you to download, and similarly, you can share your presets to help other RNB6 users.
Parrot isn’t yet ready to share prices and dates, so we’ll let you all know when we hear more lately this year.
