Cindys Blog

Pioneer AVIC-F500BT Navigation System with Digital Player and LCD Description:

The Pioneer AVIC-F500BT on-dash navigator offers an advanced, all-in-one solution for adding large-screen navigation, multimedia capability, and hands-free calling to your vehicle ¿ without removing your factory radio. Simply mount this road-ready travel companion on your dashboard and exercise convenient control over your music, phone, and navigation.

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25104 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Pioneer
• Model: AVIC-F500BT
• Dimensions: 3.88″ h x 7.25″ w x 1.13″ l, 1.00 pounds
• Display size: 5.8

Features

• Multimedia GPS navigation system with built-in antenna
• WVGA touchscreen (800 x 480 pixels
• Includes MSN Direct receiver with free 90-day subscription to MSN Direct service
• Internal 2GB flash memory preloaded with maps for the United States and Canada
• Text-to-speech technology lets voice prompts announce road names over the built-in speaker

Customer Reviews:

Good deal for $199
I’ve been using the F500BT for a few weeks after using a Nuvi 760 for years. I already upgraded to Firmware 2.0. Here is how the F500BT compares to the Nuvi

Cons:
- Routing engine not as good as the Nuvi. Very prone to give U-Turns when I miss a turn even though I disabled them. Worse is that it doesn’t know if the U-turn is illegal or not. Besides the U turn issue, most routes offered are not that bad in “Economical”
- Touchscreen not very responsive. Not as good as the Nuvi.
- Not as easy to use as the Nuvi in general.
- MSN does not work unless you use a big ugly harness. You also need to connect a ebrake signal for to avoid the menus getting locked out.
- Battery life of 30mins
- Does not auto dim the screen when switching to night maps.
- Does not tell you the side of your destination. The Nuvi does.
- Only 1 TTS voice in English. Not great, but not horrible either.
- Voice recognition doesn’t work very well

Pros:
- Nice glossy look with a big screen. Looks way more expensive than $199
- Map and menu hard buttons are very convenient to have
- GPS reception seems to be as good as the Nuvi. I get reception indoors
- A lot more information is displayed on the map compared to the Nuvi
- Plays AVI movies
- Lane Assist on freeway junctions. A MUST HAVE.
- Maps are very smooth map animation when routing. Much better than the 760, which was always 2 seconds behind and when making turns it would lag for 3-4 seconds
- Voice does not stutter unlike the Nuvi 760
- Very easy to hack and goes from good to almost great after hacking. I also have TomTom Navigator and Garmin XT loaded (more on this later)
- 3D buildings are pretty cool.
- Pairs with my Palm Centro with no problems. My phonebook does not dissapear. BT performance way better than that of the Nuvi

You can head to avic411.com forums and learn how to modify the Pioneer software aka IGO8 (its very easy). You can also add new maps schemes, and enable speed camera warnings, add extra 3D buildings, load international maps, etc. You can even hack the unit so it runs Tomtom and Garmin XT. However, these 2 don’t have the same software as the PND counterparts, so I use the Pioneer software anyways. With the hacks I now get the current house number at my position, so I can easily know which side of the road my destination is on. I also increased the font size of the data displayed on the map. Overall, its a very good deal at $199.

The potential is there – fingers crossed for FW updates
Pros:
- Large LCD screen.
- Decent maps and navigation.
- Plays video and music files from SD and flash drives.
- Relatively cheap.
Cons:
- Touch screen response is erratic.
- Text to speech (TTS) voice quality is poor.
- Voice recognition does not work particularly well.
- No photo viewer.

To start off, I am already running the new 2.0 FW. If you are not, make sure you update.

The biggest complaint that I have is overall sluggishness. Often times one touches a button, and nothing happens at all for a while. This is in stark contrast to the Garmin and TomTom units that I have, and reminds me of Windows. But my oh my this IS Windows! The unit actually runs on Windows CE… which brings us to the start up time. The unit takes a long time to start up (a “cold” boot). Since this should happen rarely, it shouldn’t have been a problem. In fact once the unit is running, pressing the power button to turn off/on the unit is almost instantaneous. However, for some mysterious reasons, the unit does decide to cold boot from time to time (see below on “cabling”).

As a GPS, the unit functions reasonably. It is not particularly fast in acquiring satellites but tolerable. The 2D maps are pretty detailed and good looking, but the orientation is fixed at pointing North as in a real map. There is no option to orient the map according to your current driving direction, as in the 3D map mode.

Despite the large screen size, some vital information (like time to destination and nearby street names etc) are rendered in font sizes far too small to my liking. My Garmin has a smaller 4.3 inch screen but the texts are a lot more readable.

For voice navigation, there are two different selections for English. One is a male voice of good quality but does not support text-to-speech, meaning that street names won’t be announced. The female version does support text-to-speech, but the quality is pretty poor. By the way none of this is in the manual…

Connecting the unit to a Blue-tooth enabled phone is a snap. I paired it up with a Razor and transferring the phone book is smooth. The unit is touted to have advanced voice recognition. Supposedly one can use natural utterances to command the unit to dial your wife. In reality the performance is poor, even using straight syntax like “call John”, as compared to the native voice recognition on my 3 year old Razor. I wish there’s an option to bypass the unit’s voice recognition and have it function just like a normal BT speaker phone. That way I can rely on the more reliable voice commands of the phone itself.

As a media player, I’m surprised that the unit does not play JPEG, which I thought would have been the simplest thing to do. As for playing video and music files from SD cards and USB thumb drives, the user interface is functional but mediocre in this day and age of iPods and iPhones. I have not tried iPod control – I just can’t justify paying another 40 bucks for a cable, without knowing how well it works. I tried connecting the iPod using a normal iPod USB cable, hoping that at least I can get power that way and then use the “AV in” jack to get the music into the unit. Unfortunately this is not allowed: the unit simply refuses an iPod connected this way. Also the “AV in” part won’t work without another special cable from Pioneer.

Finally we come to cabling. The unit comes with a big fat cable which plugs into the side of the mount instead of the unit itself. I find that useful because
1) The unit will then turn on/off automatically when power is applied/removed;
2) Since no cables is attached to the unit itself, it can be removed easily. BTW despite the size of the unit, attaching and detaching the unit to/from the mount is very easy.
In reality, however, there are a couple of problems.

First of all the unit must be rather finicky to power surge. When you turn the ignition key to the position whence power is provided to your car stereo and cigarette lighter etc, things are good and the unit will turn on automatically. But then when you actually start the engine, the power will usually go out momentarily and then come back on. This seems to totally confuse the unit, and often times it will turn off and won’t turn on again. When you manually turn it on by pressing the power button, often times it will do a cold boot.

Secondly when the unit is powered via the big fat cable, some of the menu items (like “settings”) are disabled. If this is for safety reason I find it draconian. Not allowing me to watch video? Maybe. But not allowing me to change some navigation settings? That’s unreasonable.

Overall, the unit has potential. It is a small computer running Windows with a high resolution screen after all, with all the right hardware. It has many functions, but sadly in its current form it does not excel in any of them. I ended up using it mostly just as a GPS device, and for that one can get a much nicer GPS like Garmin or TomTom for $[...].

Let’s hope Pioneer will continue to improve the firmware and come up with new updates.

Great Multimedia Car Device
I received my AVIC F500BT yesterday, and I spent the longest 30 mins of my life waiting for the battery to charge just so I can turn it on. It is an absolutely amazing device as far as I have seen. I registered my Blackberry Curve with it and made a couple test calls. Perfect! I connected a SDHC 8gb card as well as a 2gb Usb drive to test out the Music and Video capabilites. Perfect! It actually plays much more video file formats than documented. I had converted a movie to MP4 to watch on it and I had a WMV on the card as well. Surprisingly both videos played well. Though the WMV had just a little lag, which I believe is due to the fact it was not converted to the correct frame rate designated for the device.
Copying my entire contacts list to the phone over bluetooth took less than 5 minutes.
Also most important is that the device is HUGE but not very heavy. It came with all the cables for having it fully installed to enable the parking restriction and rear view camera. But it can be used with just the car power adapter. The Speaker is quite low, BUT since my 08 CIVIC LX came with an auxiliary input and this device has a headphone jack…. I AM IN CAR ENTERTAINMENT HEAVEN. Their could not have been a better device for the under $400 price range.
Oh, did I forget to mention I purchased a 16gb sdhc card for this said device. IN CAR HARD DRIVE. I basically have Movies On Demand in My CAR!!!!