Alpine IVA-D800E

Excellent Audio, Minimal Video – I love alpine audio, in my opinion, alpine has the best sound of any of the main brands. I specifically chose this unit to integrate with a PXA-H800 audio processor. For sound quality, I can't fault it. It also has an excellent build quality, all the buttons feel solid, and the volume button is great. The main problem with the unit is the software.

Here you have this big screen, and the software doesn't utilize it one bit.

There is so much space to write song names, list artists, albums etc.. yet they make the font size so large and position it so that you can barely see what is playing (it ends up scrolling)

When browsing through tracks, again, the font size is so large you can't see which is which.

If you have 5 variations of a song, it will cut off the end so you can't tell.

eg:

some long song name (...

some long song name (...

some long song name (...

The other thing is, it isn't necessary to go all out showing yourself off like a cheap unit does, but a simple visualization when the song is playing, or letting you customize the background and startup images would go a long way to making me appreciate this unit.

The other thing that annoys me to no end is there's NO play/pause button.

So, if you're playing a song and you want to pause it, you have to open up the screen, and click the software play/pause button.

That just sucks.

The volume knob on the front can be pressed, yet it doesn't do anything when the display is folded in, why not make it play/pause?

I know you can mute it, but I don't want my song playing in the background.

(i've never understood why mute is more important than pause, only for radio can I see that it helps)

Also, if anyone has a workaround for this, i'd love to know.

Finally, bluetooth...

I've given up trying to get bluetooth to work properly with alpine devices...

I've tried with an iphone 3, 3g, 4s and 5.

I've had a cda-9887 with the parrot 300bt

then i was told that had issues, so I bought the parrot 400bt (still no luck)

then I bought this unit with another 400bt (I lost the original cable to the first one)

And i updated the firmware on everything and I STILL have issues.

it works for a while, then it says something like "no bt unit" or the iphone just won't connect.

I've spent thousands of dollars now, and it still doesn't work.

This could ALL be fixed if Alpine did a software update, yet I extremely doubt they ever will.

I'd really like to see alpine bring out an android version of this (not android on win ce).

Then you'd have awesome sound with an awesome UI. Excellent Audio, Great build quality Bluetooth is flaky, bad user interface, not customisable.