D3 Firmware Wish List

[Rojma]

I've had my AVIC D3 for about 4 months now. During that time, I have found it to be a pretty good product but I have found a few short commings, especially in the Sirrius Tuner interface. If a firmware update could fix these issues, the product would be much better. Here is my wish list:

 

1) Sirrus Tuner - Ok this is the one part of the radio that is REALLY badly designed. Only 18 presets??? Only one line of song info??? C'mon!!! Give me a lot more presets! And with the big old screen, give me all of the song's info and not just one partial line. Most of the screen real estate in the Sirrus screen is grosly wasted. My old plug and play "shuttle" radio was 10 times better than this complete piece of garbage. It gave me multiple lines of text for song info, the current station tuned into, and 30 presets!

 

2) Allow to reconfigure/remap the Back/Forward pysical buttons - in both the local radio and Sirrus tuners, the back/foreward physical buttons performs a "seek". I would much prefer to use it as a "next/previous preset". I use presets 99% of the time and hardly ever use seek once I have all of my presets set. Let it be an option so the user can reconfigure/remap the buttons to their liking. This is especially helpful when I am in the Map and want to go to my next preset station instead of having to switch screens and then hitting the appropriate buttons to go to my next preset station, and then going back to the map.

 

3) Display song info for local radio - of course where applicable and supported by the local stations (and not only one line of partial text like the horrible Sirrus tuner interface!!)

 

3) Make the onscreen buttons in the tuners for both seek and next/previous preset much bigger - that way I don't have to look down at the screen to "find" them. The remapping option mentioned in #2 would problably not make this as an important feature since I would then be able to "feel" for the buttons.

 

4) Display song info from tuners/ipod in map - As one line of text at the bottom of map, display song info of song currently playing, similar to what it does when you are using an ipod and you hit the Next button. I normally like having the map up and when a song comes up that I am not sure who the artist/song is and I want to check, I have to switch from the map screen to the tuner screen. This could be an option that could be turned off and on.

 

5) Be able to turn off voice prompting in map navigation, but keep on "beep" prompting - I sometimes find the voice prompting annoying, especially if I know 90% of the route and only need a little bit of help getting to my final destination. However I wouldn't mind as much the "beep" prompt from staying on to kinda "nudge me" and let me know to look down at the map and see what the next action should be.

 

6) Show vehicle info in map - a friend of mine has a Tom Tom and it has a cool feature where it shows vehicle info, such as speed and direction, in the map view. I know you can use a seperated screen to view this info in the Avic D3, but it would be nice if it was also shown in the map view as text (with the option to turn on/off)

 

I'm sure there is more that I will think of later, but that is all for now. Overall I get the feeling that Pioneer did not too much "user" feedback when designing the product because he does have some clunky user interfaces. Anyways, we can only hope they will be improved with firmware updates.

[luvrbcs]

For some reason, my hard forward/back buttons (under the volume knob) now advance the radio one (two?, from xxx.1 to xxx.3, etc) at a time. When I first hooked it up it was for presets. Weird.

[cntrylvr79]

there's enough of these type posts please add to them.