Gps Plus Information Guide

Reviewed by Totobenki—On June 21, 2006
I was suprised to see some bad reviews about this unit because this thing is great. Here are the gists:
Pro:
- Large bright screen
- touch screen (this is a MUST now a days)
- Sleek design: this thing looks beautiful compared to the clunky design of others like magallen or garmin
- VERY FAST calculation time (only a second or two to reroute) (by the way, my unit prompted me to do a U-turn everytime it was legal)
- very fast input time. It seems that Alpine uses a better algorithm (or simply faster clock) for anticipating possible street names. I inputted letters like I was typing it in a computer keyboard)
- mp3 player works flawlessly: For those of you who do not know much about this unit, this thing has an SD/MMC card slot so that you can just pop your SD card full of music and then broadcast it with built-in FM transmitter to listen to music while on the go. Very useful.
Con
- not much, maybe the unit would be better with a better battery life but with a 20G hard drive, beautiful and bright color display, more than 3 hours is asking too much.
- It is a bit hard to get to options for choosing freeways over tollroads.
Conclusion:
all in all, a great navi. It is a bit pricy compared to the others but the large bright screen, fast responses, and the mp3 player make up for it I think.

Reviewed by Mike—On May 21, 2007
I had this unit for few months. It freeze often and need a battery removal to reset. The support from Alpine is the worst I ever seen, they simple lie to you if you call and claim that problems are features or dimisse them as minor (like random reset of the unit during routing just before a turn. The destination is lost when this happen). And the only recommendation to fix problems that I got from Alpine is to reset the unit each time. The traffic function is really bad: most of the time in only display constructions site and not the traffic (Alpine claim that this is a problem with radio connectivity but I take the same route every that for one (I get the traffic data about 50% of the times) and when I look at the status page the unit claim to have connectivity. The unit to not use the traffic for routing, you have to select an option on the screen for detour and if it happen that during the detour routes the unit need a reroute the route is recalculated without using the traffic (this is a feature according to Alpine, I could not get the guy to explain me how this can be a feature).

The unit also lack many features that garmin added in firmware updates to there nuvi units.

I do not recommend this GPS and will not buy another alpine product anymore.

Read More about Alpine Blackbird PMD-B100