Double Din Touch Screen DVD/Navigation/iPod System (eBay Edition)

[toy_toronto]

Interface:
I like the general look and placement of the physical buttons on the HU bezel. As astoman mentioned, it has an OEM feel to it.. the same type of look the navigation system that my cousin's Lexus has in his SUV. The general GUI is not perfect (not even close to) in some of the menu can be a little clunky however that is to be expected on a low-cost, windows CE platform.. expect to see a few quirks here and there but it will perform the tasks it's intended to do... seems like a fun toy so far.


** AM/FM Radio menu interface. Preset up to 24 FM station and 8 AM station. Supports RDS such as limited radio station info, current songs title, genre, etc.




DVD/Video Playback
I understand some see this as a major hazard but please, no flames. I don't intend to watch DVD movies while driving --that's just plain stupid. I have a giant HD LCD screen in the basement for that purpose. It'll be used for passengers only or as I'm waiting for people in the parking lot. There are lots of variations of these things on EBay but I made sure the one I bought is capable of Picture-in-Picture.


Clarkson on Stig: "** Some say he naturally faces magnetic north, and that all his legs are hydraulic... "




GPS:
The unit came with 2GB SD card that contained the GPS software (Route 66) preinstalled. Route 66 works well, however i thought it wasn't as good as my tomtom or the iGO8 software which I replaced it with. I made a backup of the entire 2GB SD card on my hard drive first, then I formatted it to FAT32. I then copied the entire iGO8 with North America maps to the SD card. I was surprised that it picks up the GPS satellites very quickly (under 20 seconds) even the time when I still had the antenna hidden behind the glove box during the install. I used 2-sided tape and mounted the gps antenna on top of my dash as the final placement.

One big complain I have so far though is that there's way too many features but VERY LITTLE documentation. The manual that came with it is very high level and poorly written. I sort of have to fumble around the menus, drill down try to figure things out as I go along.


** Zoolander: "I'm not an ambi-turner". Below pic shows the PIP NAV screen on top of movie zoomed at 30%. Note the PIP size can be increased/zoomed up to 60% of screen





That's all I have for now and more to come later. I'll try to post some night shots to show the different backlighting options and how well it matches the yaris instrument panel LEDs. Yes, the buttons LED backlights can be changed to green, red, or orange on-the-fly whichever you prefer.


-toy


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