Impressions: FiiO RM1 Bluetooth Remote

I remember when I bought the FiiO X7, I raised a suggestion on their forum.

“Could you make the screen stay on and support phone or car Bluetooth control without sound output? I always run AUX out to the car stereo.”

FiiO’s official reply said they understood my need and knew that controlling a car stereo through AUX input was a real problem, and they’d find a way to solve it.

So direct car control really did turn out to be difficult. FiiO instead released this little thing, a Bluetooth remote…

This thing is simple: a Bluetooth keyboard with the media keys from a multimedia keyboard—Play, Pause, Previous, Next, and volume control.

Very simple to implement, but what I want to say is:

Simple, but useful.

FiiO ships it with several usage setups: the remote-shaped one, the wrist-strap one, and the car-shaped one I care about most.

I paired it straight with the FiiO X7—no trouble at all, and it reconnects quickly after auto power-on. There’s about a one-second delay on next/previous track, but the controls are stable and day-to-day use is happy.

This thing is practically tailor-made for car AUX input. So convenient—no more fumbling for the player to change tracks!

What’s funny is that it works with a weirdly wide range of devices, desktops included. You can use it to skip tracks in a player—even rhythmbox is supported.

My desktop keyboard happens to lack these keys, so I can also control the speakers’ music remotely. A decent boost to quality of life.

It sells for 80 yuan each. Some say that’s expensive—the materials are cheap, the implementation is dumb. I don’t think it’s expensive or dumb.

Because I’ve always felt this way: it may be cheap and dumb, but it actually solves my problem, and that’s better than some big company drawing a pie in the sky and doing nothing.