Sunday, June 28, 2009

I ended up taking the Accent to Car Toys to have them install the Pioneer nav/audio unit. This thing is frakking awesome! It came with MSN Direct which gives you gas prices, traffic information, weather and you can even look up movie times. You can connect a Bluetooth enabled phone for hands-free calling. And, you can even import your address book from your phone. The navigation map changes color depending on if it's night or day. You can change the button illumination color to match that of your car. I also bought a backup/rear-view camera that connects to the unit. When you put the car in reverse, the screen switches to the camera.

The navigation system takes a little getting used to. You can view the map in either 2D or 3D, but the 3D view is really slow to draw. The biggest thing is the beeping when touching buttons (there are only 3 physical buttons and a control knob, the other buttons are on the touch screen). You can disable it in the navigation system settings, but the buttons still beep everywhere else. Also, you can turn the screen off, but the only way to get to that button is in System Settings, which you can't get to unless the car is stopped and the parking brake applied.

Car Toys only ran into 1 issue when installing. Apparently, the FM antenna cable on the 2009 Accent doesn't use the standard connection and they had to order a special adapter that won't be in for another week or so. At first, I told them not to order it because I never listen to the radio anyway. However, MSN Direct (mentioned earlier) uses the FM antenna.

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