I came from Circuit City browsing the various in dash nav monitors, and I noticed that on units that do not utilize a hard drive, you cannot use a CD and the navigation disc simultaneously. Does the F90BT use a nav disc that you cant use at the same time as a audio cd?
The new F series use a hard drive (no disk)
is there any information on the size of the harddrive? and if any portion of it can be used to store mp3s?. I noticed many models from other manufacturers use a 30gb HD with 10gb available for mp3 storage.
I'm pretty sure the F-series uses flash memory for NAV. Which means I'm also pretty sure there's no on-board storage for songs or videos like the Z-series. On the other hand, flash memory should be faster and you can more easily upgrade everything with an SD-card.
The map data is stored internally on flash memory so the disk slot is always free. It does not store music, but has an SD card slot, USB hookup, and you can buy an ipod cable if storing music is something you want to do
I came from Circuit City browsing the various in dash nav monitors, and I noticed that on units that do not utilize a hard drive, you cannot use a CD and the navigation disc simultaneously. Does the F90BT use a nav disc that you cant use at the same time as a audio cd?
Regarding the SD card slot ... does anyone know whether it's limited to basic SD (max 4GB) or is there a chance that it supports SDHC (max 16GB)?
Thank you,
pat----
Regarding the SD card slot ... does anyone know whether it's limited to basic SD (max 4GB) or is there a chance that it supports SDHC (max 16GB)?
Thank you,
pat----
According to the manual, it supports FAT32 and SDHC....
Regarding the SD card slot ... does anyone know whether it's limited to basic SD (max 4GB) or is there a chance that it supports SDHC (max 16GB)?
Thank you,
pat----
SDHC is not max 16GB, they have 32GB cards right now.
The slot will take a max of 32 GB
omniphonix & CamelTowing,
Hot damn, SDHC and 32GB!? 16GB was the largest I saw in NewEgg ... 32GB?? I could be a very happy man. That would hold a nice chunk of my 320kbs collection. Heck, it MIGHT actually hold all I have now ... will have to check. 
Wish someone made a car unit that would play FLAC. I'd love to move my collection to a lossless compression format.
Thanks for the news. I'm becoming more and more interested in one of these units.
pat----
Try apple lossless codec. Works on the ipod and plays on anything iPod compatible. There's also converters out there that will quickly convert flac files to apple lossless.
mikeinnj,
Considering I don't have an ipod, and really don't like the idea of installing iTunes ... The idea of going Apple Lossless isn't one I'd take lightly. I have a very good 60GB HDD based player now and really don't need a new one, so I'd really have to think going Apple over hard. But ... the time may come.
pat----
Yeah, I'm no apple fanboy. I've broken more iPods than I would like to count just with daily use, but when it comes to in-car integration, it's the quickest way. The iPod is different than a standard USB drive in that it has it's own indexing table of your songs, artists, albums, etc. Where as a standard hard drive based player will be a good bit slower for controlling and browsing songs due to the head unit itself having to go through and index the file structure of the hard drive each time it is powered up. Many people experienced this problem on the Kenwoods (past and present models) where each time they went to browse their USB drive, it would always take several minutes before they could start doing anything due to having a large hard drive and a ton of songs. With the iPod, each time it is synced up to the computer the index file (IIRC is an XML file) is updated and the headunit only has to load up that index file. That is why the iPod track changing on the Kenwoods and other units (The D3 for example) is so much faster than the USB. It's more an issue of the processing power of these head units. They will continue to get better and better as they approach the processing power of regular computers that are able to index a lot of files pretty rapidly.
So as far as getting lossless CD quality audio in the car and having good, quick control of it with voice recognition and album art, buying an iPod with a 160GB hard drive just to have in the glove box may not be such a bad idea to get a massive library on the go. I've had a used 30GB in my glove box and has never left the car only for updates.
Once again, I'm NO apple fanboy by any means, just stating the fact that Apple unfortunately has such a monopoly on the PMP market that these head units really are suited well to Apple's product.