Costar Bluestar 2010

EZ_ · September 22, 2010

I purchased CoStar's first unit for GM class II vehicles last december, and unpluged it after a week. The phone would arbitrarily disconnect, call quality was awful for the people I was talking to, and there was a 10-15 second delay in hookup on incoming calls.

So I emailed Joe over at Costar and told him I wanted a replacement thinking maybe my particular unit was defective, as I've heard some very good reviews on these things. Joe handled everything quickly and professionally, and offered to warranty it out and send me their new and improved Bluestar 2010 unit.

The unit has a lot of upgrades and is lightyears beyond that zip tied motorola bluetooth module that I bought back in December. It's now fully enclosed in a black rectangular box, and they've added a mini USB port for hooking up to the computer to apply updates and change settings. I've been told that A2DP compatibility (streaming audio through bluetooth) is imminent, and will be applied via a USB update when its available. This is going to be a huge bonus, because I can stop using my motorola t505 unit to stream music and pandora through an FM channel via the T505's FM modulator. The T505 is a great product and I'd reccomend it to anyone that doesn't want to spend the money on a bluestar or travels a lot, but its kind of a PITA to have to switch over to FM when a call comes in, and sometimes the signal can get a bit choppy. All minor complaints really, it works great.

I've read a lot of complaints about road noise and microphone quality for the person on the other end, and really this is easily fixed in about a minute. Plug the unit into your computer and open the settings folder. You can adjust the microphone gain (as well as a lot of other stuff) and it immediately fixes the echo and road noise issues. I found that for my 03 Yukon -12 is the magic number after testing it out on different settings. After I tweaked the mic gain I have had zero problems with the unit, people can hear me loud and clear, and I can hear them perfectly through the onstar channel. The bluestar immediately mutes your music and switches over to phone mode, whereas the old unit would take upwards of 10 seconds to redirect the call audio through the speakers (sometimes it would never get there).

All in all, this is an excellent solution for those of us that don't have factory bluetooth. I'd say the call quality rivals my friend's factory bluetooth in his Mercedes, and the cost is much less than paying for the nav/bluetooth package from a dealership. Good stuff.

xPosTech · November 21, 2010

I'm glad you like the 2010 version.

I replaced the analog On* in my '01 Eldorado with one of the first production class II units and had/have none of the problems you've experienced. It's possible you had a defective unit.

I did use custom Cadillac interface cables instead of the red/blue GM/On* cables.

If my 2010 Silverado didn't have Bluetooth I would definitely use another Co*. A2DP should rack up their sales a bit.

Ted