Alpine IVA-W205 Video

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Alpine IVA-W205
Created: 10/09/2007
Video description: The innovative in-dash Alpine IVA-W205 provides a decent range of media playback options as well as a useful navigation service and a good Bluetooth calling interface when connected to Alpine's portable Blackbird GPS device.

Alpine IVA-W205 Video Transcript

^M00:00:01 [ Music ] ^M00:00:02

>> Hi I'm Kevin Massy from CNET Car Tech and today we're taking a First Look at the Alpine IVA-W205. Now this is a brand new multimedia in-dash system from Alpine. It's a double thin sized touch screen unit. One of the things you notice when first using this system is it's got this pulse touch feature which actually gives you a little kick every time you push one of the soft buttons on the screen. Before multimedia playback this system supports all kinds of disc based media, MP3, WMA digital audio plus DVD video and VCD. All the discs go behind the roll down faceplate in this single disc slot. You get full ID3- tag information for artists, album, song title; and one of our favorite features of this is the folder list feature. It doesn't come standard with GPS navigation capabilities. All you need to do is buy the Alpine Blackbird PMB-B200; it's a portable navigation device. The magic of this system is that you can use this portable system as the navigation brains for the W205. You'll see there's a big hole in the system itself which is just big enough to slot this portable navigation device into. You have to push it pretty hard to get it in there, close back up the faceplate and now if we go to the source menu, we'll see that the Blackbird is listed as a source. And we now have full GPS navigation functionality on our in-dash system and the term by term voice directions now come through the car's speaker. This system also comes with real time traffic information which is separate subscription based service, and as an added bonus of putting the Blackbird into the Alpine system, we get Bluetooth hands-free calling. Connect your phone up and the combined system will copy over all of your contacts from your cell phonebook making them available to access and call using the touch screen itself. The Alpine IVA-W205 is on sale now for a price of around 800 dollars, but if you want the navigation function you'll have to shell out an extra 300 for the portable Blackbird GPS device. I'm Kevin Massy and today we've had a First Look at the Alpine IVA-W205. ^M00:02:27 [ Music ] ^M00:02:30

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Alpine IVA-W205 Review

Editors' rating

The good: The Alpine IVA-W205 makes use of an innovative design to combine portable- and in-dash navigation with real-time traffic capabilities. Its intuitive digital audio navigation interface and advanced audio customization options make it an attractive standalone media playback device.

The bad: When used with the Blackbird PMD-B200, the IVA-W205 suffers from some minor usability glitches as the portable can be difficult to extract. Map quality is less than state-of-the-art.

The bottom line: The innovative in-dash Alpine IVA-W205 provides a decent range of media playback options as well as a useful navigation service and a good Bluetooth calling interface when connected to Alpine's portable Blackbird GPS device.

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Alpine IVA-W205 Specs

Manufacturer: Alpine Electronics
Part number: IVA-W205

Product Specifications
  • Product Specifications

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Alpine IVA-W205 Prices

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