Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)If you know Alpine products, then you know that their quality level is always superb. This unit is no exception. I installed it in my wife's FJ Cruiser with only one snag (see below) using the Scosche double-DIN kit. Sound quality is excellent as to be expected from Alpine. Frankly, I was a bit shocked at how much power this thing was cranking out over what I had *thought* was a pretty anemic stock speaker setup.
The GPS navigation is excellent. The maps very accurate, which got me home last week during a bad snow storm by way of back roads when the mains were taking an hour to move 1/4 mile (literally). The variety of map views is very helpful as well; for example, sometimes you want the map always keeping North to the top, sometimes you want it to rotate so that the top is always what is ahead of you. The 3D view is interesting but I don't find myself using it all that much.
iPod integration is strong but not perfect. I love the fact that I could stick an old iPod in the glove compartment and control it via the Alpine unit. Pretty much a 'hide it and forget it' scenario. However, there is a periodic issue where the Alpine won't find the iPod at startup. The resolution is easy: unplug the iPod and plug it back in. Still, it is a little annoying.. I believe that the problem would not occur if the Alpine unit simply had a 5-second wait state on bootup as I think what is happening is the iPod isn't always ready immediately (due to battery drain or whatever) and the Alpine doesn't seem to do a periodic query to see if anything is connected.
Bluetooth integration seems flawless. None of my devices had any trouble pairing with the unit. When I get in the truck with my iPhone, the unit picks up my address books and provides caller ID type functionality. I would have preferred if they had given a bit more options to the microphone rather than my having to mount the boom mic, but the sound quality is very very high, even at road speed. The Bluetooth box is small and easy to tuck into your dash during installation.
Similarly, the satellite radio setup was pretty simple. Be aware that while Sirius works out of the box, if you want to use XM, you are going to need to pick up the XM Direct 2 kit (http://www.amazon.com/Satellite-Alpine-Receivers-CNPALP1-CNP2000UC/dp/B0030L7YH8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296405550&sr=8-1). This thing can be a little annoying to set up (see my review there) but nothing too terrible. If you don't have a preference, I'd go with Sirius just to save you the extra $ and hookup time (yes I know they are the same company now but the hookup remains different).
The screen is bright and colorful and can be adjusted somewhat to match the color tone of your vehicle (nice touch). One thing I particularly liked about the unit is the auto-dimming capability that measures the ambient light within the vehicle and adjusts the screen's brightness as appropriate. This is much nicer than having to wire the unit into the car's internal dimmer, particularly since you can fine-tune how dark or bright you want the screen to adjust to.
One thing I would highly recommend is picking up PAC Audio's P7 video override box. This overrides the brake signals and lets you have full control over the head unit at any time. Now, that said, *I AM NOT* advocating watching DVDs or doing setup functions while driving; please don't be one of "those people". However, the brake wiring is a real pain to hook up and in some cases actually requires you to drill a hole in your firewall! That's a bit much to install a car stereo in my opinion. These wires are mandatory, however, as I found out the hard way. We had no real interest in playing DVDs on this unit (at least until we get screens for the back seat) so I thought I could just skip that step. WRONG. If you do so, you won't have access to a lot of your configuration menus, which will in turn not let you turn on your rearview camera. This was a bit annoying. For $23 shipped from Amazon, the P7 is a no-brainer. The main reason I list this as a gripe is that the documentation does not tell you ANYWHERE that these wires are mandatory and, in fact, 90% of the system features will work without them. This led to us going down the rabbit hole a bit trying to figure out why the camera wasn't turning on despite the head unit switching to rear-view mode.
Hooking up the rear-view camera was easy; it is a one-wire installation. I used the Alpine HCA-107D (http://www.amazon.com/Alpine-HCE-C107D-Rear-View-Camera/dp/B002K3BRRU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296407060&sr=8-1) and had no real issue with it other than the above "why can't I activate this?!" puzzle.
The only other area I wasn't particularly thrilled with is the interface. The touch-screen is nice but in some cases the series of steps you have to take to access a particular menu is a bit awkward. In addition, the pop-up control menu hides itself much too quickly, requiring you to tap the screen again to bring it back up. You can override this by telling the system not to hide it, but I would have much preferred to be able to specify a hide-delay time instead.
All in all, this is a top notch unit and well worth the money. It simply does everything and it does it well. I feel safer knowing that my wife's truck now has a top notch GPS along with a hands-free setup that will actually get used (vs so many that have sound quality that makes them questionable).
Click Here to see more reviews about: Alpine INA-W900 - Navigation system with DVD player, LCD monitor, digital player and radio
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