Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I was getting tired of my stock 2007 Scion stereo's flakiness when controlling my iPod, so I had this installed. Overall I'm happy with this unit; iPod performance is flawless which is what I got it for.
Here's the good stuff:
- Appearance of the unit is nice looking. Although it is shiny shiny, it's not overloaded with bright multicolored LEDs or wacky shapes. And it's easy to change the illumination color to match the rest of your dash lights.
- Sound quality is very good; I went into the advanced settings and tweaked things like the car size, number and sizes of speakers.
- The display washes out a fair amount in bright sunlight, though it is still legible.
- iPod control is straightforward and works well; I'm using it with an 80GB iPod Classic (haven't tried generic MP3 playback on a CD or a USB drive). You can search by artist, genre, playlist, etc., set random/repeat, etc.
- The display is fairly programmable; you can change the color (only one color at a time, thankfully), and also change what kind of information is shown on many screens (i.e. when playing iPod, listening to radio, etc).
And here's the not so good stuff:
- Selecting a radio preset or a favorite (which can be a station or an iPod playlist) is a pain. You have to press a button, look at the unit and turn a knob to select the preset from a menu, and then press the knob in. MUCH too complicated for what should be a basic simple function.
- The manuals go into lots of detail explaining how to access features, but in many cases the features themselves aren't well explained. You get a printed quick start manual (which is so basic it's pretty useless), and the full manual is only provided on a CD (you can also download it).
- I've had trouble getting Bluetooth to pair on two different phones. With my Droid Eris, after that phone was updated it would never pair again no matter what I tried, and the Kenwood oddly was listed as "CK5050N" instead of the correct name in the phone's menu. At the time I figured it was a problem with the phone. After upgrading my phone to a Motorola Droid, no more problems, until I recently did another update on THAT phone, which led back to similar problems (plus the Kenwood sometimes blinking and showing "HF D-CON") but at least this time I was able to overcome the problems after a lot of fiddling - three things I did probably helped; 1) deleted the phone from the Kenwood's bluetooth setup; 2) to pair, left the phone running normally and waited for it to show a pairing request (instead of trying to pair using the phone's or Kenwood's menus), and 3) told the phone to only use the Kenwood for phone functions, not media functions.
- Once you manage to pair though, Bluetooth seems to work fine; an external mic is included. The only annoyance I found is that when you get an incoming call, you only hear loud 'incoming call' tones from the unit if you're listening to iPod, radio, etc. - if the unit is on but not set to an active source, then it doesn't make a sound when you get a call; you have to hear your phone's ringer or feel it vibrate, or look at the unit's display to see that a call is incoming.
- I don't know if this has much to do with this particular model, but I had my installers set up the unit work with my stock steering wheel stereo controls. The controls do work but they're pretty touchy - e.g. pressing volume + for too short a time doesn't do anything, but pressing it a little too long cranks up the volume a lot.
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