Clarion NX509 (NX-509)

Great unit! Minor nit-picks though...

I got this unit as an alternative to spending $2000 on a GPS option for my new car, and it's a hell of a good deal: about $850 in parts and shipping for a great unit WHILE saving a grand! A quick breakdown...

Pros:
-Very simple, clean look, very nicely blends into my car, I'd dare say it doesn't even look like an aftermarket part!
-Awesome navigation software, nearly instant GPS fix, great GUI, great and fast route-finding, a couple trip-computer functions, a mostly-complete listing of gas stations and such, but more importantly, it's found any address I type into the thing with no problems quickly routing to it.
-USB interface is nice and easy, I'm using mp3s and first time plugging in, it immediately read the drive and played, no problems.
-Sound quality is great (using my car's factory sound)
-With the SWI-JACK, interfaces with my steering wheel perfectly, first try too.
-Just drove to Vegas with it, was pleasantly surprised to see little 3D models of some of the buildings on the map! Kind of a cute touch.

Cons:
-Feels like a Navigation unit first, music player second. In fact, the software looks completely different between the Navi stuff and the rest of the stereo's audio interface, which feels like it was slapped together last minute. Granted, it gets the job done, but it feels half-assed.
-On that same note, when playing from a USB, it has a weird file system, which ignores folder hierarchy, organizes music in an apparently random order, and does not let you sort by artist, album, etc. Just great if you like playing random everything, but if you're picking something out of 8 gigs of music, it's unnecessarily inconvenient. Of course if you're picky, you could just wire in the AUX input and use that.

It's a great unit, and it's made this new car of mine a road-trip dream machine (just field-tested it on a drive to and around Vegas, it save us more then a few times in getting around the town). I also can put up with the USB interface now that I'm creatively messing with the folders on my thumb drive, but I look forward to a firmware upgrade, if Clarion will do one.