Ok, I've had 3 weeks to review the eclipse 5435 and so far I am pleased with it. There are a couple areas that I think could be better and if other brands offer a better solution I could be motivated into returning my unit. Also, if you have experience with this unit and know what I am doing wrong please let me know.
Don't read too much into this, I am happy with the 5435 and in all areas except the couple I am going to list.
Sirius Sat Radio: Searching by category. From the Sirius screen you hit "category" and the different categories are displayed, "rock", "sports", etc... Then when you select one of the categories, ie: "rock" it takes you to the first channel in that group instead of displaying the channels in the category.
POIs while driving: For the life of me I can not seem to find an easy way to find a type of POI while driving. Standard situation really, you are driving down the road and you want food. You want to do a search on food by type and you want the system to display what is local to you and how far away it is. The best I can get the 5435 to do is to display a "local POI" list that shows all POIS that are local with no way to isolate a specific type, only sort the list of all available local pois.
I'm pretty sure you can only display one type of POI and this will cause the list to be isolated to one type but this is a little cumbersome. I want to do a search for a specific category of POI. Make sense?
Does anyone know if kenwood or pioneer handle these situations in a better way? Anyone know if I am just missing something with the eclipse?
The Pioneer simply has a DEST button which you hit to take you to the Destination entry screen, where you select POI search, address search or vicinity search (among other things.) You can also create shortcuts for your favorite POIs and select what types of items are overlaid on the map, so if you just want the map to show Krispy Kreme and Texaco stations, you can easily do it.
I personally liked the Pioneer interface more than the Eclipse. It just seems higher resolution, more detailed and a lot more intuitive.
We have the Eclipse in one of our rental trucks (International SXT - it's a $100k+ pickup truck) and I don't like it at all after getting familiar to the Pioneer.
Absolutely... you can choose category, or you can actually touch the specific category and break down to specific names, like you can touch Gas Stations and then it'll list all the major types, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, etc. You can then touch (and it places a checkmark next to) each of the stations you want. Same with restaurants, and every other POI type.
OK, after looking over the eclipe again it does have the ability to find local POIs but goes about it in an odd way. That being said once I found out to go through the map view instaed of the DEST screen it was easy to follow from there.
It seems like the AVICs handle the POI function better then the eclipse, however the eclipse handles the SAT radio better (I believe that the Pioneer is limited to one line of text and no artist/track info) and the eclipse can play movies.
When you get a chance could you post some pics of the XM display while a song is playing? Also pics of the category search or any other sat radio pics would be a huge help.
Also, pics of your DVD player installed would help too.
Sorry for all the requests, but Sat Radio and Movies are important to my wife so they are important to me
GRANGER... the Pioneer is WAYYY better for XM than the Eclipse. It gives full information about the song, but it does the coolest thing... you store the song as a favorite (you can store 12) and anytime that song comes on any of the 200ish channels, it pops up with an overlay and alerts you, allowing you to switch to that channel with one touch of the screen. It's pretty amazing actually, and I'm a computer guy. The second the song is on any channel you're notified.
It's nice to see Pioneer put technology to work for the consumer!
BTW, kinda small, found it on Google, but here's a shot of the XM Radio piece with the information it shows. You can also browse by category, list all channels, etc etc etc.
Linear Mode
