After a couple of journeys, I think people who like to listen to random songs might find it easier.... I really want to listen to random albums.
Positives
+ Can't fault the text display or sound
+ Installed without drilling. I think there is enough of a gap to feed the cable through the glovebox at the bottom right, and then pull it through from the stereo cavity (I tend to be fairly idle so probably won't get around to drilling the glovebox). I didn't go for a dock so it's just a cable in the glovebox.
Negatives
- Steering wheel controls only seem to be useful for volume, back a track, forward a track and change source (i.e. Radio or CD).
- Shuffle by album seems to work until browsing through the IPOD with the headunit (then it seems to set the IPOD itself to shuffle by song).
- Skipping tracks is slow (if you listen to the first song in the album then skipping to the next album means skipping the rest of the tracks and waiting for each of them to load (probably a couple of seconds each).
Questions
? The IPOD doesn't turn off (out of the car for 50 minutes and the IPOD was still on, although the backlight was off). I've seen some reference to some versions charging for upto 2 hours after switching off.
All in all I'm not sure I'm happy enough to just leave it in the glove box all the time, the charging is the big reason, but if I have to keep resetting the shuffle mode every time I browse on the headunit I might as well stick with MP3 CD's for day to day driving.
For long journeys it's a definite improvement over the AUX-In. The IPOD used to rattle around the cup holder (where the factory fit cradle would go).. and if I wanted to skip albums it was a case of doing it by touch. It's worth the £122 quid (Not sure if I should advertise where I bought it from, but searching google for "GW16v21 uk" doesn't have that many options ;-) )
