Customer Ratings & Reviews

Good unit but needs lots of improvement

Pros:
Great iPod functions such as music tagging from HD radio or Sirius
Great navigation features with traffic update and good GPS picture in picture mode while using other radio functions.
Simple user interface for HD radio, iPod, Aux, Pandora, DVD player
Bluetooth rules!! & Great microphone for hands free cell phone use.

Cons: (hard, complex, and expensive installation process!!)
Terrible parking brake security features on installation. The radio wants you to stop your vehicle and engage brake to operate certain features. It is a nightmare to install. You have to buy a separate steering volume remote control interface to regain control of your steering wheel volume button function. This should be integrated into a unit as classy as this one. The cables at the back of the unit are too thick and take up too much room. The yellow power wire has a bulky fuse holder and my stereo shop had to cut plastic on my interior dash to make all the wires fit. Wires and connectors should be made to take up less space inside dash. I could not get the optional KCA-SC100 Sirius adapter to work with my Sirius portable tuner. These units should have Sirius tuners integrated into the head unit.

Great HD, but stops there

This is an incomplete product. If all you want is a decent, expensive HD radio, then this may for you. It has good sensitivity and works well. It could use a few more features (like content search and better display of Tags), but it's ok.

But, that's where Alpine stopped. The user interface is primitive - it's a touch screen, but very basic. They don't take advantage of screen real estate and everything is done with arrows instead of including drag. The background display is ugly and there is no control over it other than a few basic colors. The DVD and Nav functions are also very basic. The Nav's time of arrival estimates are way off (if I drove 5-10 mph under the speed limit, I'd probably still get there sooner), the map display is low resolution and there's no control over detail (not nearly enough roads are shown for the map to be useful), and it's routing is not very good. The route that it selected for a 150 mile trip would have taken me 20-30 mins longer than the one chosen by my old Garmin Nuvi that it was supposed to replace.

It's over "nannied". Instead of just an emergency brake interlock on video (very understandable), you have to do a dance with the brake pedal and the emergency brake not only to get video, but also many of the setup menus! Including simple things like screen brightness!

And it is very bright -- I found that I couldn't drive with it at night even with it fully dimmed.