I'm afraid most of the tachographs you usually use are those glued to the front windshield. For example, I used the first generation 360 tachograph engineering machine. Only some high-end models will be equipped with recorders behind the rear-view mirrors as standard, but the clarity of these recorders often cannot keep up with the development of science and technology, and it is inconvenient to replace them by yourself and need to disassemble them. The recorder attached to the front windshield often blocks some lines of sight, so I think the rear-view mirror version is the most reasonable way at present.

The product experienced in this phase is the intelligent rear view mirror tachograph (pilot version) produced by Xiaoant Technology. The reason why the product name is not directly marked with "tachograph" is that this product has many new, interesting and practical new technology functions besides the most basic driving record function.

From the box parameters, it can be seen that its chip uses MediaTek 1.3GHz processor, its camera is 1080P 30 frames, and it has built-in WIFI module (unfortunately, this recorder does not support connecting external WIFI, and the built-in module can only be used as WIFI hotspot). It supports GPS, and the network connection uses 3G Unicom signal.

1、 Appearance display

Open the box, a black rear-view mirror came at you, but you can see at a glance that the rear-view mirror of Little Ant is not a white light mirror, but a blue light mirror. The blue lens has some advantages in the anti glare high beam (glare) of the rear car. The anti glare advantage is very good when you work late at night, but it is slightly inferior to the white lens in the daytime, and you can see more clearly without the white lens.

The product includes a rear-view mirror, instructions, connectors, GPS module and power cord. It can be seen that the installation method of the rear-view mirror can be directly tied to the original rear-view mirror of the car through the connecting belt.

There are simple instructions on the back cover of the product to remind the user how to insert the SIM card and TF card in the right direction. It is more conscientious that the product provided by the manufacturer this time has a built-in 3G flow card.

From left to right on the top of the fuselage are GPS module, TF and SIM card slots, AV-IN video input (but not equipped with AV data cable), miniusb power interface. I was a little surprised at the emergence of miniusb interface, because its existence means that if you want to use the small ant rearview mirror, you can only use the miniusb power cable. It needs to be re wired, which is not as convenient as other recorders. You can simply change the body. The previously arranged power cable does not need to be moved. The small ant rearview mirror uses this interface, which makes its versatility worse and more complex.

Compared with the original rear-view mirror of Corolla, the visual area of the small ant rear-view mirror is slightly increased. In fact, it is not difficult to understand that all rear-view mirror recorders must have a larger area than the original rear-view mirror, because there is a camera behind that needs to be exposed.

After installation, the original rear-view mirror cannot be seen at all.

2、 Product use

After starting up, like Xiaoyi sports camera and other products, the logo display of Xiaoyi Technology will first appear, “See Different”。

For the first time, you need to activate the flow card according to the system guidance prompt (submit the personal ID number, and it will take 1 to 2 working days for authentication). After one or two days of activation, you can bind the mobile phone end and the rearview mirror through the mobile phone App client and the Xiaoant rearview mirror's own network.

The system UI of Little Ant's rearview mirror is almost the same as that of other brands, such as 360 Cloud Mirror. It is also based on the Android system. The home page displays the DASH CAM interface, music interface, as well as Gaud map, on-board Bluetooth, Cloud Mirror assistant and settings. The secondary page displays the weather forecast, Himalaya, traffic monitoring, online navigation, and WeChat official account with two-dimensional code.

By sliding from the left side of the screen to the right, you can slide out the "pull down" (actually left pull) shortcut, including mobile data, electronic dog, personal hotspot, on-board Bluetooth, FM transmission, shortcut switches for driving mode, and volume and brightness adjustment. In the lower right corner of the home page, various Android applications built into the system can also be expanded, such as Godmap, Xiami Music, WeChat Assistant, UC Browser, etc.

In the setting, we can obtain the specific parameters of the little ant rearview mirror. For example, the CPU is ARMv7 processor, and the operating memory is 1GB. The OTA upgrade of the product can also be carried out. The traffic card provided by this evaluation product contains 1G of traffic. After two days of simple use, 59M of traffic was consumed. When it comes to online navigation, the traffic was lost very quickly.

In general, the charge is a little expensive, but the SIM card provided by Xiaoyi has 1G traffic, so it can be used for a period of time, which is not bad.

The advantage of the small ant rear-view mirror is that it integrates the tachograph, navigation, music, voice control, etc., and is more intelligent. However, the use of navigation is a dilemma. Many old drivers have said that on the one hand, navigation is listening, but many times it is necessary to see to know the direction. Especially in a strange city, when you hear the instructions, you may have stood on the wrong road, so we need to see the specific path of navigation. If the navigation is displayed in the rear-view mirror in real time, you can't use the rear-view mirror to view the situation of the car behind you. Some friends may say, "I don't need to see the situation of the car behind me. I just need to look at the car in front of me.". That means you are either a novice or an old driver. At least I often look in the rear-view mirror. Especially when I am driving at high speed or changing lanes in the urban area, because there is a certain blind spot in the right rear-view mirror, I will use the rear-view mirror in advance to see if the car wants to accelerate from the right. Therefore, during the experience, when I use the navigation, I will add an additional voice control: "Hello, ants, please close the screen". Xiao Ant is good at voice control. He can understand such sentences, and the screen will turn off immediately. Of course, navigation can only rely on listening rather than watching.

After SIM card activation and networking, we can also bind the mobile phone client with the small ant rear-view mirror. After binding, with the help of the GPS module, we can realize the vehicle GPS remote positioning. It is very useful to say that when your friend borrows a car, you can fully grasp the specific location information and movement track of the car.

Personally, you can also learn about your driving habits through this function, In addition to the driving track, there is also a "driving report" in the app client. In the report, we can see how many times we have experienced "rapid acceleration" and "sudden braking" during this driving. After 25 times of rapid acceleration like the railway yard, we are not a gentle old driver, and driving is still a bit aggressive. There is no way. Sometimes the traffic jams are really grumpy.

In addition to the navigation function, the small ant rearview mirror can also throw sound into our car audio through FM radio frequency, making the sound more loud and the bass effect better when playing music, which of course depends on the quality of your car audio. The weather conditions of every day can also be understood at the first time. When you are tired and bored, you can also listen to Guo Degang's crosstalk (Himalaya), which has rich functions.

3、 Comparison of basic functions

I mentioned so many things and showed the intelligent functions of the little ant rearview mirror. But no matter how intelligent the system is, I want to say that after all, the driving record is the most basic, basic, useful and practical function. What about the clarity of the driving recorder of the little ant rearview mirror, The Railway Research Institute has used many types of tachographs, but has always loved the first generation engineering machine of 360 recorder, So， It's a mule or a horse. Pull it out and run.

The above two groups of pictures are taken in the daytime. The reason why the time of the two recorders is different is that Xiaoyi's SIM card was not activated at the time of shooting, so the time cannot be automatically corrected. However, by comparing the pictures (taken at the same time), the wide-angle of the two recorders is almost the same. The 360 wide-angle is slightly more but not much more, and the edges of both recorders are obviously distorted. Because the installation position of the recorder for license plate recognition is slightly different, one is to the left and the other is to the right, so the daytime definition seems to be about half the same. The resolution of 360 screenshots is higher than that of ants, so the 360 picture of license plate seen by everyone is larger.

Here we need to remind you that you can pay attention to the white balance of the two recorders. On September 17, 2017, it was sunny in Jinzhou. The weather in coastal cities was good, and the sky was blue. The small ant rearview mirror tachograph may be used to improve the brightness and display effect. The overall color is white, the white balance is incorrect, the color of the sky changes from blue to white, and the "Chaoyang Bank" and "Financial Center" on the buildings do not display more clearly than 360.

As for the night, the little ant rearview mirror has a lot of slots. Although it is a product of this year, the noise is more obvious than the first generation 360 DASH CAM two years ago (purchased on May 28, 2015).

Summary:

Through one week's experience, I think the small ant rearview mirror has the following advantages:

1. The accuracy of speech recognition is high, but only for commands that can be recognized, such as where to navigate, turning off the screen, turning on music, etc.

2. Integrating navigation, weather, music, GPS, etc., one device realizes the functions of multiple devices.

3. With FM radio frequency, the sound can be projected onto the car audio, and the sound generation effect is better.

4. It is easy to install, and with GPS module, it can realize driving positioning and driving track.

5. The client can give each driving report to facilitate users to understand their driving habits.
   

At the same time, the small ant rearview mirror also has obvious disadvantages:

1. The built-in SIM card is expensive and not suitable for long-term use. Although the built-in WIFI module can only be used as a hotspot, it cannot be connected to external WIFI itself.

2. The power cord adopts the old miniusb mode, which has poor versatility. The car charging terminal does not support USB input and will occupy a car charging port.

3. The basic tachograph has general function clarity and obvious noise at night.

To sum up, I think the design concept of Little Ant's rearview mirror is good. It can be said that "cloud mirror" is also the development trend of future DASH CAM GPS、 Voice control and so on are concentrated together, so that the car owner can free his hands and rely on his mouth to achieve navigation. In an ideal state, we hope that just saying "Hello, Little Ant" can lead us to a happy journey. At present, the product experience is both good and bad. Many novel designs have been added, but some basic functions have not been improved.

However, I personally think that it is not a bad thing that there are slots in the product, and these shortcomings are exactly what the future product needs to improve. If the above shortcomings can be solved at one time, then the next generation of small ant rear-view mirror 2 will certainly become an excellent intelligent product. I hope that manufacturers will see more than just problems, Instead, it should be immediately put into action to solve the shortcomings put forward by users. In this way, it is a truly ideal technology company.

For free trial and professional review information, you can follow the Woaiqiku official account (woaiqiku)