Riverman

Do you have a light in your glove compartment? If so, you can probably pop the light out and using a Dremel tool, carve out a little spot big enough for the cable next to the light. Then you just push the cable through the hole and snap the light back in place.

There's no chip that controls the charging. It's only a certain resistor value in the plug, so the Apple Composite Video Cable, which is designed to charge an iPhone 3GS, and let it output video (that's the only thing the Apple chip controls), will charge your iPhone. JVC also has a cable they make for some of their head units that will also work. I use one in my car with my F700BT.

I updated my iPod Touch to the 4.0.1 firmware, and the alphabetical search function still worked, but it was horribly slow. It took ages for the list to update to the letter I had selected. I ended up buying a cheap 30GB 5G iPod video from a friend just for use in the car. It's much faster than the Touch.

I have that same Garmin mic and it works great. It looks much better than the Pioneer, and has more mounting options. No one I've talked to has said that it sounds any worse than the original microphone did, either.

That's how modems all connected before the days of USB. Most cell phones can still emulate a serial port connection for networking. I don't know exactly how people are getting a serial connection into the AVIC, though.

We have another option for an iPod cable besides the Apple one. The JVC KS-U30 charges my 3G iPod Touch and outputs video, so it must have an Apple authentication chip in it. I had the Apple composite video cable, but due to the way my iPod sits in my glove compartment, the cable would pop out of the iPod a lot of the time. The JVC cable has a locking plug with release buttons, it's black, and it's slightly more flexible than the Apple cable.

It supports SDHC just fine. I use a 4GB Panasonic SDHC card in my F700BT. Try formatting your card on a computer or in the AVIC (if it has that option) instead of in your camera.

It seems to be a problem with the Touch, and possibly other newer iPods. Album artwork looked fine with my 5G iPod, but has the pixelated look on my new Touch. I can't remember how it looked on my 4G Nano, but it may have been pixelated, too.

I had a 5G iPod that worked great with my F700. The album art actually looked better than it does with my iPod Touch now. Every so often Buy.com has refurbished 5G iPods pretty cheap, around $100-$150 depending on capacity. For that price, you could almost afford to get one and just leave it hooked up.

The RCA cables on the Pioneer cable are definitely sturdier than the thin, flimsy wires on the Apple cable, but I like the slimmer dock connector plug on the Apple, plus the fact that it doesn't have the release buttons or the dust cap that just dangles around all the time. The Apple cable also comes with a USB charger, which is nice.

Since you say it's new, you should have a stylus in the box. If not, your plastic-tipped pen should work fine, but I think a lot of us have had to calibrate the screen before it will work worth anything. I couldn't get mine to register a screen press on anything in testmode until I calibrated it.

That's my feeling too. My only real complaints with my F700BT are the lack of speed-dependent volume, a preset turn-on volume level (both features my old Blaupunkt had), and the constant "GPS signal lost" message every time I go in a parking garage or tunnel, but for something that had those and had as nice of an interface as the Pioneer, I'd have to pay much more than I'd ever be willing to spend on a head unit. Since installing 3.0, it's plenty fast and hasn't ever had a single problem, even with 2.0.

Yep, that's the one.

That's exactly how I felt after reading all of these posts, but I updated my F700 the other day, and it couldn't have been smoother. It didn't fail anywhere during the installation, and in 40 minutes or so it was all done, and I couldn't be happier with it! My feeling is that on any internet forum like this, most people are posting because they have a problem that needs to be fixed, and the ones that are doing fine never chime in.

I'd use the sub out on the head unit. You'll have much more flexibility that way, since you can adjust the level, crossover frequency, and even turn the sub off, right from your dashboard. You'd lose all of those abilities if you used the pass-through on your other amp.