JVC El Kameleon KD-AVX44

4/10 Too Many Flaws....

sidepipeuk - 03/19/09

I bought one of these after seeing all of the great reviews... and indeed its feature list is impressive. However, in practical use it is at best, annoying. I won't list its good points, because they have been covered, so here are the problems: 1) Without OEM steering wheel controls, it is downright dangerous if you are on your own in the car. Simple operations such as changing the volume, turning TP on/off, etc, require that you take your eyes off the road, and even then it is hit and miss whether you manage to do what you intended. 2) The interface is very slow. 3) If you have TP on and are listening to the radio, there will be several seconds of silence at random intervals because the radio keeps re-tuning briefly to another frequency ( not when there is actually a traffic announcement it seems. ) This happens in the UK - RDS may be different in other countries I guess. Interestingly this is not the only system that I have seen this happen on. 4) You have to remove the faceplate, because it still looks like radio despite efforts to hide that fact... and the faceplate is MASSIVE and very easily scratched. 5) If you have a large USB stick, it takes an age ( maybe 30 seconds for 8Gb ) to read the directory structure before actually playing anything. This would be acceptable if it were not for the fact that it has to do this whenever the playback is interrupted, not just when the unit is powered on ( after a traffic announcement, for example. ) 6) Considering it has a 3.5 inch monitor, the interface is pretty boring. No artwork for MP3s, static backgrounds etc. etc. So, it could have been SO much better. I hope that it is firmware upgradeable