I am some times amazed at how some of the interface decisions made by designers of products will impact how satisfied I am with the device. I have had a few little interface qualms about my car “entertainment system”, that is what they call it. Recently they have reached a point higher than I expected.

I purchased the mid grade entertainment system for my car as I wanted the integrated sattelite radio. I really wanted XM but they have Sirius, oh well at least they have ESPN which was my main concern. So I had the mid grade system installed. Still not a cheap decision but I did not want to take my car and install in an aftermarket solution. I did that on the last car and I was never quite satisfied with it. The mid grade system comes with the following items:

• 7 Channel Surround
• Sirius Satellite Radio
• In Dash CD Player
• Six CD Changer
• Pre wired for Cell Phone integration

Not a bad little package. It also indicated that it would play MP3s. Not my favorite things but for listening to Podcasts, it means I would not need to convert them. So I have been using it for a little over a year and these little idiosyncrasies have been just that idiosyncrasies. However right about the new year these little idiosyncrasies have reached a breaking point and they have now become annoyances. What is frustrating about these issues is that my hunch is that most of these items could have been avoided. So I figure I might as well share them with you my loyal readers.

Only the Six CD changer plays MP3s
This one seems small but here is how it becomes more of an issue. I like lisenting to a few different Podcasts. So I would place them on CD-RW so that I could listen to them while I am driving. Perfect there is an in dash CD player, which should be easy, right? Nope that does not play MP3s the six CD changer does. However the six CD changer takes a cartridge, so one has to eject the cartridge, slide out the tray for the CD to be loaded, place the CD on the tray, close the tray, and then reload the cartridge. I also forgot the step of the fact that the CD changer is located in the glove box. So it is a little more intensive than just sliding a CD into the slot. Once you have loaded the CD into the changer it does not display any CD text or other information.

The scan feature for the Satellite Radio is oddly grouped and doesn’t tell you what group you are working with.
So there are one hundred plus channels on the satellite radio. So it is not always practical to scan channels looking for something. I can save my favorites in presets, but sometimes one just wants to scan around. So the approach is to have different categories, News, Sports, Rock, Country… etc. Seems fairly sensible. It is a little odd to have to press “PTY” to access the categories and then use soft up and down buttons to change the category. However the challenge happens in two instances. The first is that there is no display telling you what category you are in, you have to press PTY to see what category you are in. The other challenge happens when things change programming, an example being that sometimes sporting events take place within the “Talk” Category. So one now has to scan two categories to look for the sporting event. Yes, one could look up the channels on the Internet to see what channel it is on, but what happens if one is not expecting to be out and about so they did not look it up.

The display for the Satellite Radio does not display all practical information
I do not expect all the information to be displayed at all times on the display, but I do expect to have a few things displayed. One of them is the station number. That information is not displayed, nor is it accessible through a button press. One simply wants to know what station they are listening to. I wanted to listen to football games while driving around. I just wanted to be able to change between them. I was having to scan across two categories so it was not smooth. I would either have to pick the “All category” and then click up and down on the soft buttons to find the channel, program it into a preset (why should I replace my existing presets?), or change category (press PTY, use the Up and Down soft buttons, select the category, then use the seek buttons to change the channel) Now if the channel numbers were displayed, I could simply press the asterisk button to indicate direct entry, then the channel number. But unless I look up the channel number ahead of time, I do not have that information.

It does display the channel name, but I have not memorized all the channel numbers to names yet and I am not sure that looking it up on a print out is the best idea.

However I can get to the Radio ID number in two button presses, once the radio is activated why do I need that so readily accessible?

The display does not scroll
The inexpensive satellite radio receiver I have for my motorcycle has a scrolling display, in fact it has lots of information that scrolls across and I can decide what I want to see, including the channel number and name. The display for the entertainment system does not do this display mode. It simply displays the first ten (10) characters and then ellipses Not exactly the most helpful piece of information. Here are some examples the left hand column is how it is displayed, the right hand column is the complete song title.

Artists it does the same thing, channel titles, the same thing. It does not display CD text or other information at all.

Radio Band Changing
So now comes the fun of trying to get to the different bands on the terrestrial radio stations. The soft buttons have changed features again, so now one can change frequency. How does one do it. Well press Radio, then press SAT to change to FM, press FM to change to AM, press AM to change to WB (weather radio). Being that the display of digits is different for all four bands, okay probably three of the four are different. FM is two or three digits, a decimal point, and then an additional digit. AM is three or four digits with no decimal points. Sattelite and Weather radio are both capable of being one digit numbers less than or equal to six. However since that only takes one character out of the ten character display, the weather band could be set to display as WB# so that one could tell what is being listened to.

So after having spent a year with this system I am still disappointed by it. I have also decided that as a result of how the interface works I do not want to spend the money for the iPod or phone integration. I am not sure how user friendly it will be. The technology itself is pretty good. It is just the implementation that keeps me from liking it.