Sure it didn't look like this. Sorry about the spelling guys!!

 

And then it gave a "Dear God!" Message after that

It's funny to me that say, 30 years ago, this guy would have bought what he feels is a crappy product and could only go down to his local pub and whine to his friends and neighbors about it.

Now he gets to posture and huff to thousands and thousands of people across the country with his attention-whore rants.

Here's a tip. Research a product you want to buy very well. Follow directions when you use it. If it breaks, or you are unhappy with it - return it according to the stores/manufacturers rules. This course of action should serve most consumers well on any reasonably accepted transaction.

There of course are always exceptions to the rule; like say, it was purchased off eBay to save on a reasonable cost, or it was modded outside of what the manufacturer says it should - but by and large, electronic devices such as the AVICs work the way they should or companies like Pioneer wouldn't stay in business very long.

Don't like the unit, get another and worry about sh*t that is really important in life instead of endlessly carping about it to an audience that is more often than not HAPPY they purchased it and is pleased with the performance.

Well, this was some fun reading!

gdiviney, I feel some of your pain but try to lighten-up.

My F90 falls short of expectations but for now it does the job.

Skip the SD and enjoy your Ipod, mine works great...

It's better than the factory nav unit that was in my Vette!

All I can really say..

User Error.

Wow.. I feel like I'm back in grade school, keep at it guys.. it's certainly a riot to watch!

gdiviney,

I have waited a few days to add to this post. I was laughing my ass off reading your description because it is RIGHT ON THE MONEY!!!

The only issue I have not had is with the SD card playback. I use all WMA and it works like a champ. Well, the random play sucks but that is my only gripe.

I have a couple of additional issues that bug the crap out of me. One is when you turn the nav voice all the way down, it still cuts out the music for a split second when it was going to say something. In fact the fact there is not a button to completely disable the voices (and not make the music cut out) and another button that disables the annoying beeps for the ENTIRE UINT. Instead we had to put blank wav files in the place of the stock sounds.

ALL THAT ASIDE. Let me tell you why I purchased the F700 and I am not sorry I did.

You touched on it in your post and may of not realized it. LOOK AT ALL THE STUFF IT DOES! It has the most features of any unit on the market today, and does NONE of them well.

However, it is a software driven unit. So this means that it has potential. Look at what has been done on this site. The possibilities are unlimited!

Is this the unit for the "take it out of the box and use it as is?" Maybe not. But it is a quality piece of hardware with some primitive software running it.

I personally like Windows CE. It is a rock solid thin client. BMW choose it for iDrive so if BMW can put it in $100,000 7 serries then I think it is quite fine for our $500 Pioneer F series.

I am ok with Pioneer releasing the units like they did. It allows for us to give feedback for where we would like the uints to go and also allows programmers on forums like this to create alternatives to the factory software.

My previous system was Kenwood. I spent $3000 on the three pieces that made it up. (DDX7015, KNA-DV4100 and a 20GB music keg) It was an awsome navigation, very awsome MP3 player, matched with a crappy head unit.

So if you look at the $579 I spent on the F700, I think it is a pretty good deal.

haha, wow. This was one hell of a flame war. Has to top the charts for worst ever.

I am not quite sure if it was the unit was so bad upon initial release the issues now are just so mild in compairson they don't exist for me, or the unit really si good now.

I don't use the sd card, cd player so I can't comment on the buggyness or functionality of those. However, blue tooth with iphone 3g, voice recognition, navigation and ipod control all work fine for me. My one compalint is the quiet blue tooth mic pickup but other then that im pretty happy now.

I would say your unit was defective and was slowly dying with memory read write errors, which uh, happens with computers espcially when its in a constant hot/cold envirment like that.

My unit has had zero crashes on me since I updated the unit, I remember thsoe out of memory errors when looking up poi's.

Boot up is reasonable now, 30 seconds to interface is a lot better then teh 1 minute plus before.

So, yeah, am I a fanboy will I defend this thing to the death? No, but it does deserve credt, its come a long way since june an it deserves that much.

haha, wow. This was one hell of a flame war. Has to top the charts for worst ever.

http://www.avic411.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ong+bypass

This one got really out of hand

haha, wow. This was one hell of a flame war. Has to top the charts for worst ever.

 

http://www.avic411.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ong+bypass

 

This one got really out of hand

LOL! I just read that thread CatchMe, and this one doesn't even hold a candle - hilarious stuff!

Cheers,

Kev

All I can say is WOW. I installed the F900 into my Corvette and everything works great. The SD playback is great I have most all of my CD on a 16gb sd card with no problems. The nav is awsome and the backup camera works fine. I can play tunes and video from my Iphone 3G with no problems. My only complant is the mic for the BT phone is not censative enough and I am thinking of replacing it. All in all it is a great system so far,

Yeah that one does take the cake!

haha, wow. This was one hell of a flame war. Has to top the charts for worst ever.

 

http://www.avic411.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ong+bypass

 

This one got really out of hand

agreed.. wow.. that takes the cake for just sheer flaming on multiple fronts, and just horrible use of language. thanks for pointing it out!

All I can say is WOW. I installed the F900 into my Corvette and everything works great. The SD playback is great I have most all of my CD on a 16gb sd card with no problems. The nav is awsome and the backup camera works fine. I can play tunes and video from my Iphone 3G with no problems. My only complant is the mic for the BT phone is not censative enough and I am thinking of replacing it. All in all it is a great system so far,

Don't bother replacing the mic, this is a bug in the new bluetooth software and has been resolved in the eu update, now just have to wait for the us update. If history says anything though, it will be another month or two and a big update rollup will throw this in there.

My mic is also very soft on bluetooth, been like this since the 2.0 update. But hey at least it works now.

Thats awesome. That bitch had a dirty mouth...or it was a dude? Guess we'll never know

haha, wow. This was one hell of a flame war. Has to top the charts for worst ever.

 

http://www.avic411.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ong+bypass

 

This one got really out of hand

Yea Ill never forget that one.

I just installed my F700BT a couple days ago. Upgraded the firmware right away as I did... ahem... research before I purchased this unit... as i do with most large purchases.

Have not had a single issue.

- Navigation works fine.

- Bootup time is understandable... it's a computer, not a single DIN head unit.

- Plays music from SDCard, USB and CDRW.

- Touchscreen is responsive and not laggy.

- Will do the delete or silent wavs soon enough to remove the beeping.

All in all, it's a great unit.

I really think he has a defective unit because I am not experiencing any issues he is describing. If other people have the same experience as I do then obviously either A: the unit is bad or B: it's not getting enough power/hooked up right or needs a full reset.

Have you performed a full factory reset after you... ahem your "installer" performed the upgrade? This is required.

Maybe what you might want to do is stop complaining and maybe try to fix your issue. We're certainly here to help but if you judge a product solely based on this single example then I wonder how you judge other products and people in general. I'm not trying to take shots at you, but if you have over 15 years of computer experience then you should have a very good idea of how this stuff works. Especially knowing from the get-go that it runs Windows CE and firmware upgrades are available for it.

I have about 5 years "official working in the IT industry" experience, but again, that means nothing if you get a new product and do not do some simple research before you buy. It's the same as when people go out and buy a cell phone and complain it does not work then return it and never use it again. Obviously it does work because millions of other people are using the same device without issue. I understand the user base for the F700BT is smaller but it's the same idea.

I think what you should do is the following:

1. Stop crying: Perform a full reset of the device, maybe even run through the 2.00 Firmware upgrade.

2. How old is your USB flash drive? If it's older it's probably not fast enough to read media from. Have you tried another flash drive to rule out the drive as the problem? Does it hang and stutter on an SD card?

-- Mine works fine...

3. Replace the unit... you know... it is under warranty if you bought it retail...

Too bad this thing didn't run OS X eh... that'd be sweet... if you can reinstall Windows you should be able to operate a stereo.

God damn.

First impressions:

A big shock to me was to find out that this P.O.S. is a P.O.S. because it's running a version of Microoft Windows.

Day 3 through now:

Let me run down the primary features and my experience with them:

Startup:

This unit will not do anything for at least a minute and a half.

Navigation:

In your rush to get a product to market, you bought a terrible OS from Microsoft, used sub-standard hardware on which to run it, and ended up with something so laughably bad that a $100 Magellan kicks the s##t out of it.

Bluetooth:

If you're on the phone and you turn your car on, the F700BT will terminate your call for you.

SD card reader:

One feature I was excited about was the SD card… no more CDs or USB dongles… just a nice, clean SD card in the front of the unit. What could be better?

...And, since there’s no seek capability on the SD, you are screwed if you want to get back to where you were on the track.

CD Player:

This part works. Good job pioneer. Hooray. Too bad I haven’t used a CD in 5 years.

Summary:

This is, by far, the worst stereo I have ever used. The main selling points for me were the navigation, the Bluetooth, and the SD/USB music systems. All of them are far-below acceptable.

My experience is totally different.

1) Some people will find it a plus that it runs on windows. It gives you options to tweak and modify it far beyond of what other players are capable of.

2) If you listened to Radio or CD last, the unit starts to play or continue the last song within 15 seconds of starting the car. That's how I listen to my music so for me it's perfect.

3) When you cut power to your bluetooth device and the phone is closed your phonecall will always end. No matter if it's an ear-based bluetooth device or in this case a Radio. What's cool about the F700 is that when I start the car and start conversation on my phone, when BT loads it automatically picks it up on the radio and I can close my phone and continue the conversation using the radio. Just remeber to open the phone before you turn off your car, that's just common sense.

4) Navigation works very well. You have options to navigate based on how fast or highways, or as economically as possible etc. You have 2D and 3D navi, you have accurate directions. It works just as good as my TomTom 720Go and has similar features. The screen draws just as fast too.

5) SD plays Divx movies, plays MP3s, is used to update the firmware and the two SD cards I tried, 2gig and 15gig SDHC worked great without any issues. MP3 can also be seeked through using the volume knob.

I think most of the problems you have with your unit are due to the install. I think that not enough power is being given to the unit. Either due to poor wiring or dying battery or maybe bad ground. I think these units are very sensitive to not getting enough power.

My unit only crashed and rebooted once in the 2 months that I've had it. The maps draw quick and radio reception and sound quality are far better than on the stock stereo. I could not be happier with it. Then again, I installed it myself so that might have something to do with it. I know that my wiring is done right because I did it myself.

For me the two best things about this unit are great BT and good navi and both work as advertised so I'm a happy customer.

haha, wow. This was one hell of a flame war. Has to top the charts for worst ever.

 

http://www.avic411.com/forum/viewtopic. ... ong+bypass

 

This one got really out of hand

 

Yea Ill never forget that one.

epic

You all know that if everyone agreed with you it would be a VERY boring world. There is some facts here that do need addressing. I am truely annoyed at the responses that used profanity in addressing this poster. What ever happened to free speech. We have it here in Canada and I know my brothers and sisters in the USA have it as well. I may have termed the original title a little different. There are ways of addressing issues without putting the majority of people on their defensive. I think the poster should have wanted to warn potential buyers of some pitfalls that he may have encountered with out hitting the radio on the head. My Son and I just updated our new F700BT's in my shop with no car, hooked to my Harley battery, my Cell phone in the basement and one stereo home speaker. We just spent the best 3 hours playing with this thing I have had a a very long time. What a freakin' toy. We got to see the changes that were made from version whatever to version 2.0, smoking speed over the way the radio came. The date codes on both radios were June 2008. Come on folk, lose the instant gratification, so it takes a second or two to do something. You gotta grow up with dealing with things in minutes. You should see the Sony that my 700 is replacing....laughs...My only concern is that my corvette has a 1 1/2 DIN space and how I am going to cut out the dash to make this darned thing fit, but it will. You want to see number one, I am an electronics God, but I dont want to be number one, life is so much easier if your number 10 or 20. Let the hotshots be number one. They do all the work and I am getting too old for that crap. I was a Beta tester for Windows 95, yup a real piece of crap at the time, but I learned that it was so much better than Windows 3.11. I am dying to install this radio in my Vette, but I live in Canada and winter has set in. March 30th is my install date. As of now, I have it rocking on my test bench, my shop in the basement and spent the best 3 hours in my life with my boy sorting it all out and calling friends through it as a joke. My boy just bought one of them fast and furious cars, something called a Mitsubishi Evolution 10, old school, new school, both getting the 700 as the sound system. Lighten up folks, let the message prevail. Free speech is the foundation. Bless our troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan and our American Brothers and Sisters dying in Iraq for a better tomorrow.

Kirk

I don't know why every one is bashing on gdiviney

I too got a faulty 700bt and have eMailed Pioneer on it.

This dude posted a detailed overview of his device and you guys are bashing him like it's a birthday party and he's the pinata.

Freak'n chill out!

This 700BT is flaky as hell! You must have experience w/*several other models to know what he's talking about. I've been an independent installer for as long almost as long as this guy's 15 years and in comparison to all those units, this one has way too many issues for production. (leave it to MS)

My biggest complaint is that the device is freak'n sloooooow! It's ridiculously sloooooow! There are bug's in this device that probably haven't even been posted.

I strongly believe Pioneer is on the right path but this device is slooooow! Good thing I only paid $360 for the unit and I have already sold it.

What sux is that I ordered the 90bt and now I'm hearing it too has some of the same issues. Before the 700bt I had a Kenwood Excelon Navi system and the touch screen on it worked like it was supposed to but it was outdated and I'm an electronics enthusiast who needed the "latest and greatest".! LOL!

(when I say several I mean more than 2 brands and more than 15 units! Even a weekend geek can understand what I mean.)

I'm new to this Forum. So I'm still looking around.

Hopefully this place has a location were people can post known bugs to keep track.

From what I've read some one here has a contact @ Pioneer no?

Any way, Happy New Years you Tech SAVY GEEKS who only want the BEST!!!

To you cranky F's, enjoy that coal you got for X-Mas!

I don't know why every one is bashing on gdiviney

I too got a faulty 700bt and have eMailed Pioneer on it.

 

This dude posted a detailed overview of his device and you guys are bashing him like it's a birthday party and he's the pinata.

 

Freak'n chill out!

This 700BT is flaky as hell! You must have experience w/*several other models to know what he's talking about. I've been an independent installer for as long almost as long as this guy's 15 years and in comparison to all those units, this one has way too many issues for production. (leave it to MS)

 

My biggest complaint is that the device is freak'n sloooooow! It's ridiculously sloooooow! There are bug's in this device that probably haven't even been posted.

 

I strongly believe Pioneer is on the right path but this device is slooooow! Good thing I only paid $360 for the unit and I have already sold it.

 

What sux is that I ordered the 90bt and now I'm hearing it too has some of the same issues. Before the 700bt I had a Kenwood Excelon Navi system and the touch screen on it worked like it was supposed to but it was outdated and I'm an electronics enthusiast who needed the "latest and greatest".! LOL!

(when I say several I mean more than 2 brands and more than 15 units! Even a weekend geek can understand what I mean.)

 

I'm new to this Forum. So I'm still looking around.

Hopefully this place has a location were people can post known bugs to keep track.

From what I've read some one here has a contact @ Pioneer no?

Any way, Happy New Years you Tech SAVY GEEKS who only want the BEST!!!

To you cranky F's, enjoy that coal you got for X-Mas!

we're not cranky, we just don't appreciate someone coming in and taking a shit on a product we like. If you don't like the product, return it. No need to cry your eyes out on an Internet forum.

we're not cranky, we just don't appreciate someone coming in and taking a shit on a product we like. If you don't like the product, return it. No need to cry your eyes out on an Internet forum.

Not to mention his unit is obviously defenctive based on his review.

Yea the biggest issue I think with most people had here is not that he didn't like the product but because he chose to slam the product on a pro F series site and obviously either exaggerated, lied, or just plain was unqualified to operate the unit. We all understand the issues with the F series at this point but to go to the links he did just didn't sit well with people here. He should have saved his rant for the Alpine or Kenwood sites. Completely bashing to that extent and not sounding credible on a pro F series site is never going to go well.

I completely see were you're all coming from fellas.

I think he could have been bashing on it a lot worst like the one from the link teron added. Not that dude was way out of line!

How else can you give your honest review on a product though. I mean I didn't see any direct bashing.

Any way, it sux either way that he got a bumb HU and from what seeing w/the one I'm getting rid of so did I. Problem is I couldn't return it. Circuit City closed all it's stores in AZ and they sold as is. Those bastards didn't even provide a manual. Good thing there is always online!!!

Any way I'm going to go read up on some more stuff.

The one thing I like about this HU is same as some one else mentioned here. That it's a MS OS and so it can be tweaked once some good samaritan programmers get enticed to do so.

Fellas thanks for the valueble info on this AVIC411 site! Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to every one even if you're not a mod! I love the internet because people share power a.k.a. Knowledge!!!!