Heh... at 1:25, "Watching a TAT presentation" suddenly changes to "Thinking about summer vacation"...

Presenters (and college professors) are gonna love this view into what their audience is really thinking about!

@Russell Easy, you just look for a Coulomb-equipped recharging parking spot! If EVs take off, you'll see these things replacing parking meters all over. These posts provide not only a recharging outlet, but also serve as a parking meter and are web-connected. Thus you can have the computer in the dashboard display a map showing the nearest available recharging spots! http://www.coulombtech.com/

How about a DualPhone for Skype users in the US? Please?

Steve wrote "then again, who's going to burn what you can archive to HDD arrays"

Um, people who don't have HDD arrays, or for that matter tons of free hard drive space? I have a 120GB drive in my oldest TiVo with stuff that's just been parked on it for several years. I'd love to be able to (easily) burn and archive stuff I don't want to lose, but don't need immediate online access to.

I guess that's why I bought the full TiVoToGo at MacWorld, but it was only $70 on show special. Then again, if you don't mind putting the pieces together yourself, there are free, if lesser-featured, alternatives (http://www.macobserver.com/tip/2007/01/02.1.shtml)

(Oops, punctuation truncated my previous clarification.)

Sorry, I should clarify my previous comment:

"The display doesn't just show you the name of the item as you're scrolling through the list. It displays it slowly, one letter at a time."

This doesn't actually happen in "list" mode (when you're scrolling through artists, genres, or playlists). List mode is actually pretty cool, in that you see several items displayed at once, and even a relative position indicator (like a scroll-bar except that it's view-only) that shows you were you are in the list. Loading the items for these lists was relatively fast, even on my ~9000 song 4G iPod with 800+ CDs. If only that big knob free-wheeled instead of doing the bump up/down thing.

Anyway, the slow-display thing only happens in song mode, when the display looks like it does in the picture at the top of this article. That is, once you select an album and want to skip to the next song (say you're looking for a specific title but you don't recall what track number it is). The letters of the song title are "typed out" one letter at a time. It can take several seconds to get to the point where you can see enough of the song title to know if it's the one you're looking for or not, and I sure hope you aren't driving while you're waiting for the song title to appear. (It probably takes about 10 seconds for the three lines shown above to display.)

One other point: The display has three modes, toggled with the "View" button to the right of the big round knob. One is the view you see, with small album art. The second is a larger album-art view, and the third is an interesting (if somewhat retro?) date/time display. Too bad this part isn't customizeable or extensible. Oh, and though I didn't even ask, I have to assume the display does NOT play video from the iPod.

Sorry, I should clarify my previous comment:

>>>
The display doesn't just show you the name of the item as you're scrolling through the list. It displays it slowly, one letter at a time.

I spent about a half hour in the Alpine booth at MacWorld yesterday, most of which was in their demo car playing with the installed iDA-X001. Here's some stuff I learned that you won't get without playing with the unit and talking to someone who knows all about it (like an engineer on booth duty from Alpine in SoCal):

The 5G support is the best deal. It uses the USB interface for faster device control, and only 5G iPods will show album art on the color display. The audio is sent digitally, but presumably AFTER decoding (and DRM). So the iPod decodes the music, but still sends it digitally to the Alpine for conversion back to analog.

My iPod is 4G, but that requires the separate $30 full-speed cable. Device control is still better than any previous (DIN-sized) Alpine unit I've played with, including two other "new" models they had on display (which were, to me, still relatively unusable). Audio from a 4G is sent in analog to the Alpine, not digital (since the 4G allegedly doesn't support digital audio out). No album art.

The cool thing is that if your family has multiple iPods, it would seem that you can actually have two (a 5G and a 4G) connected at the same time. They appear as separate sources: iPod 1 and iPod 2.

Unfortunately, for $450, Alpine does not include a HD radio tuner; that's a $250 option. Yes, that's right, Alpine's optional external HD tuner costs more than a whole JVC KD-HDR1 AM/FM/CD stereo with built-in HD Radio -AND- the JVC iPod adapter ($175 + $50 @ Crutchfield). I'm eager to see if it's even slightly usable, as I'd almost rather throw away the JVC unit in a year or two than pay top dollar for the still-not-perfect Alpine.

The Alpine Bluetooth hands-free module is also optional; that's another $200. Obviously the cool part is that all of these modules should work together seamlessly, but I'll believe it when I see it. For some bizarre reason the MacWorld demo car had neither HD nor Bluetooth installed so I couldn't try either one out. If you get both, that's $900 in hardware, before installation.

As for usability, the color screen is awesome. A few gripes are immediately obvious:
- The big round knob does not free-wheel. It's a slight twist in either direction to increment or decrement whatever you're doing. What's up with that? I absolutely HATE up/down models, rather than a knob that free-wheels. The last Alpine deck I bought was selected specifically because they included a round volume knob instead of up/down buttons. Anyway, if you're trying to select an artist, album, song, or playlists, it's "twist, twist, twist" or "twist and hold while it keeps going" which brings me to the next gripe:
- The display doesn't just show you the name of the item as you're scrolling through the list. It displays it slowly, one letter at a time. There's no option to change this, and the Alpine engineer said that there is also no provision for updating the software in this deck so even if Alpine realizes how stupid this is, they can't fix it in already-shipped units. They should either fix it and make stuff just appear all at once, or make it an option for the one person out there who may like it. It's hard to explain how lame this is; you just have to see it.
- When you finally do get to an item you want to select, your brain says to push the big knob that you've been turning. However, that isn't "enter". "Enter" is the little button that says "ENT" to the upper-left of the big round knob. I assume people will eventually train themselves to know this, but it's really hard to fight instinct. Don't Alpine people have phones or PDAs or home theater remotes with five-way (four directions, and PUSH to select) navigation joysticks?

I really want iPod support, HD Radio, and Bluetooth, all in one integrated solution. I'm an Alpine fan; all my after-market stereos, amps, speakers and alarms have been Alpine over the years. I'm just not sure it's worth paying $900 to get ALMOST there. For that much it should be perfect, or at least upgradable. Maybe next year, though I've been saying that every year now as Alpine introduces each new model.

That said, they'll sell a ton of these. Not because it's perfect, but because it's probably still better than anything else available. The problem is that the bar is still so low. :-(

I agree with Carl... How about a 750p, and preferably available in unlocked form! As a 650 user on T-Mobile, I think I'll pass on the 680, but an unlocked 750p might be interesting...

Our solution for not staying up until midnight or timeshifting w/TiVo: Live on the west coast and watch the ball drop (live) in Times Square... which happens at 9pm here. :-)

"iTV obsoletes DVRs"??? Really? Only if you intend to pay $1.99 for each and every show you watch -- including shows that otherwise appear on your cable feed every day for free. iTV doesn't compete with DVRs unless it comes with (or supports as an add-on) a Tuner and DVR software. Otherwise, it's just a box that plays movies you bought in iTunes on your TV (which makes some amount of sense since it's about the ONLY way you're going to be able to watch them on your TV).

Funny, Apple has a movie store, but no box (yet) for your TV. TiVo has a box for your TV, but no movie store (yet?).