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Engadget Podcast 169 - 10.31.2009
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Robert Aitchison @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM
I have an AVIC N-1 and is surely could benefit from a hard drive, sometimes even in an are you are semi familiar with you may want to look for a store or resturaunt so I'd have to pop in the navigation DVD. If a hard drive could hold all, or at least most of the data that the DVD does that would be a fast improvement.
Probably my biggest pet peeve about the N-1 is that for "safety" reasons they disable dront seat DVD viiewing (sensible) and they disable virtually all of the navigation system when the parking brake is off. What this means is that not even the passenger is able to operate the navigation system when the car is driving. Thankfully it's relatively straightforward to disable to parking brake check to enable my passenger to operate the nav system. I was told that a "feature" of the AVIC N-2 was that you were no longer able to work around this limitation, presumably it now uses GPS signal to determine if the vehile is in motion, which means I guess you're screwed if you want to watch a DVD on a long ferry ride. Presumably the Z-1 has the same limitations that the N-2 has.
As far as the features of the Z-1:
The smart routing feature sounds good, sometimes the N-1 can pick a pretty stupid route, there was lots of room for improvement there.
The brand icons sound great for when you are travelling to anoher city, a lot of people (myslef included) like to stik with what they know in a strange place and this would make that easier.
The bluetooth option is huge, I'd love to be able to turn my Avic into a hands free system.
One thing I don't see there is an option to re-enable the steering wheel controls that are no doubt in the ast majority of cars that the Z-1's drivers have. Even my sub $20k Mazda3 has steering wheel mounted controls that are useless with the N-1. I'd pay $100 in a haeartbeat, maybe as much as $250 if I could get my steering wheel controls back (there are adapters that use the infared port on the AVIC but they suck, I'm talking a wired interface from the steering wheel to the unit.