[jmorton10]

How much difficulty have in putting either the Kenwood or Eclipse into my 2003 XLT? I have the factory 6cd changer that "appears" to be the right size. I have gone to Crutchfield and they say these will not fit.

Crutchfield says that because you have to trim the factory dash opening slightly to get ANY double DIN unit to fit. It is simple to do, but unless it's a straight bolt-in, Crutchfield will not list it.

~John

 

[jmorton10]

I have the Alpine iva-w205 :

I know that is a DVD player, but is it also a NAV unit??

~John

 

[jmorton10]

it does not have the NAV built in but what is cool is you buy the portable Alpine Blackbird 2 and you can put mp3's on the blackbird and it docks inside the unit :

Yea, that is a cool idea. That NAV unit does not get very high marks from reviewers however (I don't remember why right at the moment, but there are drastic differences between different brands of NAV setups), but I haven't personally tried it myself so I can't comment on that.

~John

 

[jmorton10]

http://www.gpsmagazine.com/2006/11/alpine_blackbird_review.php


Quote from a review of the Blackbird:

"As if the address entry problems weren't enough to ruin the Blackbird, the routing engine performance was even worse. I tested the Blackbird against other similarly priced GPS units, including the Garmin StreetPilot c550, Garmin nuvi 660, TomTom GO 910, and Magellan RoadMate 2200. I also tested the Blackbird's routing performance against several online mapping providers (Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, and MSN Maps). The Blackbird lost in every single road test - consistently choosing inefficient routes and routing me bizarre ways.
In fact, the Blackbird was never able to correctly route me to a destination -- even on short trips with obvious roadways. The Blackbird is stunningly bad a figuring out which roads to take."

These where listed as the "cons" in the review:

Awful routing engine (the Blackbird couldn't route me correctly to ANY destination I tested)
GPS receiver performance not competitive with other units that use SiRF's chipset
Terrible address entry system - I had to experiment between entering the city first, or the street name first in order to find the address I was looking for. In some cases I had to know the exact cross street in order to find the address on the Blackbird.
Lots of vibration while driving, due to the poorly designed windshield mount
No text-to-speech
No route exclusion feature (route exclusion allows you to tell the GPS to avoid a certain road or highway when calculating the route)
Shorter than average battery life (~2 hours of continuous use)
No 3D Map view (map is shown in 2D only)
When entering the State name, you have to scroll through a list of every state, in alphabetical order, one at a time
MP3 player doesn't support playlists
No way to customize the level of voice prompts (you can turn them on or off, but you can't specify what types of things should be announced)
Screen not as bright at some other units -- I found the display hard to read in bright sunlight
Unnecessarily massive windshield mount
Slightly difficult to dock / undock the Blackbird from the cradle
No automatic power-off feature (i.e. automatically shut down the unit when the car is turned off)
No Bluetooth

 

[jmorton10]

GPS/NAV units are kind of a hobby of mine & have been for years (my first unit had a black & white screen). I sold Garmin units at one time & they are my favorite units at this time.

I have used/owned/tested most of the units on the market at one time or another (I actually have 3 different NAV units to choose from in my truck right now). To me, the routing engine performance is the first thing I look at when choosing a GPS. I know how frustrating it can be to own a unit that has sub-par routing. At one point, I owned a Pioneer Avic Z1 built in double DIN unit. This $2200 unit was an absolutely AWESOME entertainment center, but the routing engine was awful (I ended up selling that unit on ebay).

We where out scouting colleges for my son to attend & that POS was routing us to one we had never been to. At one point, it routed us off an exit that came to a T where you had to turn either right or left. Although both my Wife & I where pretty sure the school was to the left, the unit insisted we where to turn right which we did. About 5 miles down the road, the unit piped up & said "make a legal u-turn". We where on a 4 lane divided highway at the time...... I had to go another 5 miles or so to find an exit where I could turn around, just to end up driving right past the exit where we should have turned left in the first place. No NAV unit is perfect, but this kind of stuff happened constantly with the Z1.

Another time it gave what seemed like a very round about way down the East coast to another school, so I pulled up Google maps on my PDA & had Google plan a route. Google's route was 89 miles shorter & made perfect sense.

~John

 

[jmorton10]

wow...I didn't realize alpine could put out such a poor product. Alpine used to be top of the line!

I agree, I was an Alpine dealer when I was in the stereo business.

The problem is, Alpine does not actually make the NAV unit but relies on some other company to supply it & just puts their name on it.

~John

 

[jmorton10]

That's alot of misdirected miles. Is there one for a reasonable price that can do the routing correctly?

ANY Garmin unit will work just fine for you. All the Garmin's use the same routing engine, just the features are different.

If you choose another brand, make sure it has Navteq maps in it as opposed to Teleatlas. Teleatlas work better in Europe, Navteq are better in the USA/Canada etc.

~John

 

[jmorton10]

I've heard that Alpine units have went downhill overall...not just in the nav units but that their stereos haven't been up to par either...

I didn't realize that, but I don't really keep current on mobile audio anymore.

~John