Alpine Car Media Player

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I installed an Alpine iDA-X001 media player in my work van about 6 months or so ago and until recently, have not tried it for playing music directly from my BlackBerry Curve.

Although I have it running through about 1200 watts of amplifiers, subwoofers and speakers, I’m not going to do a review of sound quality as I will leave that to the numerous audio websites and forums.

The head unit comes with 2 connection cables. One for an iPod connection and the other with a USB port in which you can plug a USB to Mini-USB cable into. (Both these cables can be connected at the same time and run through your dashboard at time of install)

The Alpine iDA-X001 is a digital media player only (as well as an AM/FM radio) and doesn’t include a CD player of any sort. The controls are not un-similar to those on a Classic Apple iPod with a dial acting the same as the ‘ClickWheel’.

My main source of music was coming from my Apple iPhone and this works very well with integration  between the 2 seamless. The BlackBerry however, is a little different in the way it operates on the High Res Alpine screen.

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With the Apple iPhone, you get all your ‘Albums’, ‘Genre’, ‘Artists’ and recent playlists. But with the BlackBerry you get none of these privileges. Just a list of the songs you have stored on your media card. That’s about it. They play fine on the Alpine unit and you can zip through your song list using the Alpine control wheel but unless you are the type why just likes to hit the ‘Shuffle’ icon then this can be a real pain in the butt. It’s not a fault of Alpine or of BlackBerry.

This unit is primarily designed for use with an Apple iPod and with that it works just fine. But if you want/need to use it with a BlackBerry it will get the job done with just a whole heap less features…

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