Chrysler iPod Integration

Why not just make the CD players MP3 compatible like everyone else?

Really!... I agree... the iPod may be the ultimate personal/portable music listening device, but the car radio has so many other options... XM, Sirius, MP3, CD....

Because digital players like iPods & Rios don't skip no matter how much you shake them. They're also easier to carry around than a stack of CDs are and Apple is going for the "Kewl Jeep" demographic with DC.

Cheers, - Jeff G

67 Kaiser Jeepster Commando w/ a CD in the dash.

Good point.... then I choose satellite radio... JimG

The two wilderness camping trips I took this year both contained sizable portions off-road and I do not recall Shania Twain's voice ever skipping.

Perhaps it did skip but I was distracted by crunching and scraping....

... 8 track.... _____________________________________________________________________

2003 TJ Rubicon * 2001 XJ Sport * 1971 Bill Stroppe Baja Bronco

"There is a very fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental illness'."

Pronunciation: 'jEp Function: noun Date: 1940

Etymology: from g. p. (G= 'Government' P= '80 > Really!... I agree... the iPod may be the ultimate personal/portable music

My friend's iPod kept crashing, and he had to send it back to get fixed. The technology keeps getting more and more complicated and "capable", but this doesn't necessarily mean "more reliable". He's still waiting for his iPod to come back, while I am listening to tunes on my 256M RCA Lyra, and my even more Stone Age friend is listening to CDs.

Earle

I think because iPods are trendy and this is DC's direction for Jeeps - trendy. Tomes

I bought my wife a 30 gig iPod for Christmas this time around. It took us half the day to get it to talk to the computer. We had to find the solution searching the internet. One would of thought that they could have put the answer in the box, it was merely procedural (a mac thing?). It was a Christmas frustration that I did not need, with my wife all pouty and all. We did get it to work and it works well now and she is the happy wifey, spending _a lot_ of time now on the computer loading in CDs worth of music and walking around in another world with the earphones . Now, getting it to talk to the vehicles would be a next step.... Tomes

I have a 20 gig HD based Mp3 player that spent two years bouncing around on the dash inside a Frieghtliner semi (which are WAY more punishing than any jeep) 5 years later and it still works like new.

Oh and the last three years of that have all been in my jeep sitting loose on the hard plastic center consol.... And I drive across two sets of RR tracks twice daily... and I have a "Rough" Country lift... and a

31" tire that's out of round...

There's something nice about NEVER wishing you had brought your "other" CD's.

-- Simon "I may be wrong, but I'm not uncertain." -- Robert A. Heinlein

...them air ride cabs ride pretty nice. bet your mp3 player didn't get that roughed up *g* I'm all for HD based mp3 players, I have 4 myself...(NJB1, NJB3,Zen, and MuVo²) I spend a lot of time in the ng's reading the woes of peoples players that got dropped, or washed in the washing machine, or otherwise abused, and then they complain they're not durable enough. One of the regulars there straps his player to the tank of his BMW every time he rides and it seems to hold up... My JB3 has a 60 Gig drive in it now with ~10000 tracks... soon to be upgraded to 100 Gb so I can have room for the audio books too. Nice to have an audio book to pass the time on long road trips!

I would rather see just a simple USB connection with which you could hook up any USB based storage media instead of just an MP3 player like the iPod... Seems this would provide considerably more flexibility in addition to being cheaper for the end user...

You could spend $90 for a 250G HD,

$20 for a USB enclosure for the drive, for $110 have a storage media that should be able to handle mostpeople's audio collection... Of course, this solution relies upon using commercial off the shelf (COTS) components which would require a DC-AC inverter to provide 110VAC for the HD, but if you were willing to spend a little more money per GB, you could go with a laptop HD and the enclosures for them can be powered from the USB bus... ?EdpNo=1173249&CatId=0$140 for a 100G 2.5" laptop drive + $10 for the external enclosure = $150for a 100G music source... The flash memory USB drives could also be used for those cases when you really wanted to ensure that no skipping was going to be possible... A 1G Lexar flash drive goes for $57... Or using the flash memory cards from your camera would also be possible with one of the USB flash card readers for around $10...

I think iPods have been trendy too long to call them trendy. n.