Alpine iDA-X001

When I bought this unit a couple of years ago it was the best iPod/iPhone solution on the market. Initially I was very pleased with it, but over time it has become increasingly unreliable, perhaps in part due to iPhone software. I have also become increasingly aware of / annoyed by it's limitations.

Despite what was at the time revolutionary integration with the iPhone by showing artwork and accessing menus at full speed, the user interface on the iDA-X001 is poorly conceived. For example you can view album artwork at two sizes, by the larger size just blows up the smaller image resulting in a pixelated mess. There is a bug where if you press the phone button to browse your contacts and decide not to make a call, the only way to escape the menu is to press the mute button twice. You press the big button to initiate the menu but somewhat unintuitively, you then have to press the "Ent" button to make a selection from the menu. Despite the large screen size, you can only view the artwork/song details or the clock, not both. The song details scroll so that you can read the full track name but at a speed which makes you wonder if it's even moving. It can take 30 seconds or more to scroll through a five word track name. It crashes occasionally, or fails to find the iPhone, or fails to play any sound. It chokes on songs and playlists with french accented letters or even apostrophes in their titles. The list of niggling inadequacies like this goes on and on.

The small size of the removable fascia is a great feature, making it feasible to carry the face in your pocket, and the integration with the iPod and iPhone is generally pretty good. Since iPhone OS 3.0, scrolling though menus has slowed a little but it is still reasonably fast. However, a major problem was introduced in iPhone OS 3.0 which is Bluetooth audio (when used with the Alpine KCE-300BT bluetooth module). When you connect your iPhone to the iDA-X001 it starts playing music. 5 seconds later, Bluetooth audio streaming kicks in and the music mutes. The only way to recover is to detach and reattach the iPhone, or wait 10 seconds after starting the engine before connecting the iPhone. There is no way around this.

When used with the KCE-300BT, integration with the iPhone's "phone" is great, except for the terrible audio quality. I can hear my callers perfectly, but they moan endlessly at me about not being able to hear what I'm saying as my voice intermittently cuts out despite my having tried various microphone locations and talking volumes. I have stopped using it except when I have no choice - chatting just isn't worth the hassle.

The iDA-X001 is embarrassingly less usable than the Apple products it is designed to work with. It does a passable job of integration and sound quality is good. It looks attractive, but there are far too many usability problems with this unit. Perhaps they could have been solved with firmware updates but as far as I can tell, Alpine have never released any. Today I am replacing my iDA-X001 with the new Parrot RKi8400, which I will review in due course.