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On the fence F90BT or DNX 8120


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I have been flipping back and forth between these two units ALLLL week. I currently have the 700BT which is going back for the 90BT tomorrow. Though the current F series units are riddled with issues, and the 8120 looks awesome with Garmin nav, two usb ports, two av inputs, relay controls, dual zone, Hi volt preouts, etc.

 

Though, I just can not give up the voice control for iPod. That is my primary source and I have tons and tons of music. Being able to sit there and change through my hundreds of classic rock and prog rock albums with long titles all while flying onto an entrance ramp is awesome. No hands off the wheel for more than a quarter second to push in the big button and tell it which Dream Theater album to play. I can not give that up. My only big big gripe that makes me want to go with the Kenwood is the brightness of the pioneer screen in ambient daylight, or lack thereof. The thing is damn near impossible to see with any decent amount of light in the car. Mainly due to the all black and gray interface. I had the Kenwood 5120 (The runt of the new Kenwood navs) and the screen was beautiful. Could see it clear as day, even in DIRECT sunlight. The Nav was awesome, the iPod interface was great, no voice control, but it was as fast and easy to choose songs as you could get with a touch screen. The bluetooth was good too, being by parrot, and the voice transmission was better than the voice on the Pioneer 700BT bluetooth. Never had a complaint with the Kenwood. The thing booted quite fast too. Hopefully, but doubtful that Pioneer will be able to fix the poor outgoing sound quality on the new Parrot bluetooth. Seems like the circuitry is picking up a lot of interference from the internal electronics of the unit, or the supplied microphones are total crap.

 

So right now, the 700 makes me angry with its "You have not wired your parking break correctly" message, the obscenely long bootup times, sluggish interface, and the nav still sucking. Can't get text to speech to work for street names. If I try to search for POI by name, it freezes and reboots, errors out EVERY TIME. Sometimes, after changing sources, the voice control prompt does not want to come up. OR, you press the button, the audio mutes like the screen is about to show up for voice, but it never does. So you are sitting there with no sound, no ability to unmute it by changing tracks/sources and the only way to remedy this is to shut the engine off while stopped in traffic, restart the car and wait freaking 3 minutes for everything to turn on and reconnect, just to have it happen again. This happened to me yesterday while coming back from dinner with a friend. The thing is a slug, and when one thing starts to act up or freeze, it has a snowball effect and more and more and more shit starts going wrong and erroring out until it just nukes itself. I damn near punched the thing the other day I was getting so frustrated with it. I can not believe that Pioneer would let this out of the door. SERIOUSLY HOW CAN THEY NOT TEST THESE THINGS. Did they compile the source code, forget to run it and just ship it out just because there were no compiler errors. I mean, It only takes, what like 2 minutes of using it to figure out that it's not working right. I sure did. I had that sinking feeling in my stomach within the first 5 minutes. /rant

 

The 8120 seems like it is a much more mature and stable unit. The ONLY real thing that I had a problem with on the Kenwood 5120 is that the iPod would occasionally freeze if I tried flipping through too many tracks at a time and require me to unplug and reconnect the iPod, though probably due to my old ass 5G iPod that is loaded to the brim with lossless tracks, lol. Also the Bluetooth did not always connect right away. Though, that was an external box, and I did get rid of it before the new 2.0 firmware update came out for the BT adapter. So that could very well be taken care of.

 

Right now, I'm very, very, very caught. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the Garmin nav, and the big screen, the idea of all the extra connectors, that I would actually be able to use. But at the same time, voice control is the new gotta have feature. It really works. Not a gimmick like kenwood's voice dialing. I swear, I'm about to take out the Skilsaw and cut out a second double din opening just to have both units.

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So the Garmin Nav is that much better if everything works on both? I like my Kenwood 5120 but like you really wanted the voice control like Sync. I don't like that the screen sucks. Is it like the D3 or worse? It will be hard to get rid of the 5120 then. I already ordered the 700BT and 90BT. :)

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Resolution wise, the Pioneer is great. It's true DVD resolution and looks damn impressive with movies at night. The screen itself is not that dim, it is the interface that is dim. The black on dark gray color scheme is unchangeable so it may as well be a like having a dim screen. You can not change the color of the menus to something brighter or with more contrast. Driving around in the day, all you can see on the screen is black with some faint letters and icons. I'll try to snap a pic tomorrow to show you what I mean. When I used the nav to go out to dinner the other night, the maps looked all washed out at 6:30 at night. They really should have had the option to change the menu colors or wallpapers. The D3 has all that and had what appeared to be a brighter screen due to a much more colorful interface.

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