Alpine iXA-W404 Video
Alpine iXA-W404 Video Transcript
>> Antuan Goodwin: What's going on guys? This is Antuan Goodwin on the floor at CES 2009 and we're here in the Alpine booth. We're about to take a look at one of their newest units to see what they've got going on here. Now the Alpine iXA-W404 is a digital media receiver. It's actually kind of a digital media center. Now what they've done is they've added big 4.3 inch touch screen to their already pretty cool dual rotary encoder kind of thing. So that basically that will give you the ability to navigate through things by kind of touching and sliding like you would in Coverflow. So if you've ever used an iPod or iTunes, you'll already be pretty familiar with the paradigm and how that thing works. So you'll flip side to side a switch between your different areas of controlling it so you'll go to your camera. You'll go to your navigation. And then you'll go to your audio. And when you're ready to change your source, you'll flip up the change between things like radio, between your iPod or whatever other sources you have hooked up to it. So it basically picks up on Alpine's formula of completely dropping the CD player and relying on you to use digital audio sources to playback. But it also adds digital video sources because that full speed USB connection will also pull your music videos, video podcasts and movies off of your iPod. Now you can also output that through an AV output to a rear seat entertainment so you can keep your passengers entertained while you're driving around. Other options that you can add onto this are a backup camera. You can add on satellite radio, HD radio. And when you do that HD radio you get that really cool iTunes tagging feature we love so much. And you can also add Bluetooth modules to this so that you can speak hands free while you're driving. We really like this new interface. It looks really cool and it's very easy to use. And it also gives you that flexibility of using the iPod, the rotary encoder or that touch screen so you've got all these different options and you're pretty much use the unit as you see fit as the best way possible. Well this has been Antuane Goodwin and we're on the floor at CES 2009 in the Alpine booth and we've been looking at the iXA-W404 Digital Media Center.
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The good: The Alpine iXA-W404 offers lightning-quick search of iPod and USB libraries and playback of iPod videos directly from the device. Add-on modules allow users to choose the features they want, when they want them. Alpine's double-action encoder is as quick and easy to use as ever.
The bad: Touch-screen controls are unintuitive and, at times, unresponsive. The interface is unnecessarily complicated.
The bottom line: The Alpine iXA-W404 shows plenty of promise, but we'll wait to see if the touch-screen interface improves with the next generation.
Manufacturer: Alpine Electronics, Inc.
Part number: iXA-W404
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Onlinecarstereo.com |
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$475.00 |
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Crutchfield |
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Abt Electronics |
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