Christmas presents 3: iO PLAY 2

Some time ago the people at Armour Automotive put one of their iO PLAY products in my car. It's a Bluetooth kit that enables you to play music from your phone and receive calls whilst driving (please, please tell people you're driving and cut the call short, focusing on the road). You'd think when they offered to upgrade me to the iO PLAY 2 I'd have been delighted, but initially I wasn't. I didn't see how they'd improve on something this simple - pair a phone or two and it just works. Easy.

Nonetheless I agreed - for the blog they'd offered to do it for nothing, saving £159.99 plus installation, so other than curiosity about what they'd change there was nothing to lose.

I have to tell you it's marvellous. Many new cars now link their stereos with phones anyway, so there isn't much point in buying this, but if you have a relative whose motor doesn't do this it's worth considering getting one as a gift for them. First there's the built-in iPhone charger (for the iPhone 5 you'll need an adapter as the charger has changed). It doesn't stop there, though.

There's a little display. This tells you which phone you're linked to. It has called ID. It has a voice - through the speakers it tells you who's texting and will read texts. It will, if you're linked through the charger rather than Bluetooth and using Siri on an iPhone, accept spoken commands. It lets you switch between tracks, albums (displaying the title), car audio, look up numbers in your phone book and initiate calls without taking your eyes off the road (although I'd still recommend pulling over if you're going to be thinking about a call rather than the road hazards).

The original iO PLAY set my phone free - I'm not a massive headphone fan so driving with my music is where having a music phone comes into its own. This upgrade has allowed me to do more with it than just play music, and spares me the bother of fiddling with the handset finding music before starting the car, it remembers five devices so I can have my iPad as well as my phone ready to work without booting my wife's phone out of the memory.

It is, quite honestly, pretty damned good and well worth the money. Unless your car already does this stuff I can't find a single down point.

Clean under your car

My thanks to the people at Karcher who sent a review unit of their Chassis Cleaner. They pitched it as a lifestyle accessory for men; that's fine, I'm a stereotype, although if you haven't got a driveway (I haven't, we park on the street) it's not going to be easy to use.

The principle is simple. Your car gets damaged not only when it gets dirty on the surface but when it gets dirty undereath. This is where salt gets into the wheel arches and elsewhere and you might as well start saving up for its replacement immediately.

So if you haven't got a garage with a platform onto which you can drive the car and clean it from underneath - which I'm guessing covers the vast majority of LifeOver35 readers - you need something that will turn the average jetwash into an underneath-the-car jobbie.

This is easy to assemble and does the job well. Typically from Karcher the water pressure is impressive. Yes, you'll need a good bit of space and an outside tap is a help - the distance between the kitchen in our terraced house and the pavement outside would make this impractical as a regular thing. Nonetheless if you have the set-up then the just-north-of-£80 including VAT I found on a website could be a very good investment that will extend the useful life of your motor.