As I mentioned in a previous thread, I have purchased a new Honda Fit, with Navigation. The Nav system comes with an integrated stereo that has an impressive feature that surprised me.

Maybe I have been out of the loop so long that this is old news and everybody has it now, but the stereo has a USB connection that allows me to plug in a flash drive with music on it and control the playback through the steering wheel controls. There is also a PCMCIA slot that lets me use (with proper adapter) various memory cards like CF or SD for the same purpose. I can also plug an iPod into it, but not my iPod, only certain models are supported.

The UI is nothing like an empeg (no surprise there) as it is a flat database (more like a Karma or an iPod) but I can sort and select by album, artist, or genre (maybe a few other things) and play tracks in order or shuffled, with the MP3 tag information displayed on the Nav unit.

Is this a pretty impressive thing, or is it common on new cars these days? This is the first car less than 10 years old that I have owned in decades, so I haven't been keeping up with the new technologies.

tanstaafl.

This is pretty common, I would say, at least as an option.

BTW, I found that various iPod interfaces (say, on my cheap Panasonic home theater) are rather inconvenient (at least for my 160GB model) unless one prepares playlists in advance, as navigation through artists or albums is typically flat, without quick scrolling or search available on iPod itself.

I haven't tried an iPod with the car yet (mine isn't compatible) but from various Fit forums, the consensus is that the iPod interface is not worth the rather expensive option price (it came standard on my car because I got the Nav unit).

In my case, the UI isn't that important because I do all the setup on my computer. By that, I mean that the Nav/Stereo lists all the tracks (or albums, or artists, or genres) in the order they were added to the flash drive. So I organize everything on the computer to be in the same order I want to see it displayed (in my case, alphabetically by artist/composer) and then load the flash drive. It is very quick, for example, to scroll down to Mozart on the Nav/Stereo, touch the List Tracks button, and pick out Rondo Alla Turca. Currently I just have about 40-50 hours of my most favorite picks from my "Favorites" playlist filling less than half of a 4GB flash drive, and I let the Nav/Stereo play them in a random shuffle.

Now I'm trying to decide whether I want to buy a larger flash drive (16 GB? 32 GB?) and load up lots more music; or buy half a dozen small flash drives (2 GB) and load them by category (i.e., audiobook; classical; contemporary; etc.) and just swap them in and out depending on my mood. It's an interesting thought that I can store about 600 hours of audio on flash drives in the same physical space that one CD case would take up in my glove box, and that's not even a particularly space-efficient way to store it. I mean, a pair of 120 GB iPod classics would take up about the same room as the CD case, and would have more than 4,000 hours of audio. That just purely beats the hell out of my old 8-track player, doesn't it!

It's no empeg, no doubt about that, but a $4.00 flash drive only costs a third of one percent of what my first empeg cost me!

tanstaafl.

i have a head unit in my old merc estate, i believe it came from one of the discount supermarkets over here (unbranded) and while it doesn't have the search facilities - at least, i don't think it has - it takes sd cards and a usb. i always have a 2gb sd in there, the usb will vary, sometimes a laptop hard drive (it struggles with 25gig of data) or a 2gig usb stick with y current fave stuff on it.

guess it cost the equivelent of about $75 at the current rates. cheap as chips!