tonyballinger.com

While I love my Mini Cooper, I have missed my iPod on my morning commute. And for me, selecting CDs for the car is an involved process. What if I take only a few alternative rock CDs and I get into a mood for some IDM electronica? What if I get an itch to hear Tom Waits and I only brought Radiohead? Selecting CDs for a drive of any length is an arduous process.

So you can imagine my relief when the DICE iPod integration kit for the Cooper showed up in the mail this week. Installation was actually pretty straightforward – it just plugs into the CD changer port in the trunk. You then run the wire to the front seat for your iPod, and conceal the wire as best you can. (My concealment is acceptable but inelegant). The only spooky part for me was the step where I had to disconnect the battery. I am not a handy person by nature, and I had visions of me electrocuting myself during the process. But all went well and the DICE was installed without a hitch.

The only frustration occurred when using the DICE for the first time. Once the iPod was initialized and the head unit and iPod were communicating, the song title not only read on the face of the head unit (which is good) but also replaced the display of the navigation system (which is bad). The navigation system is one of my favorite things about the Mini and I would likely always be using the iPod when driving – which means that the navigation system would become moot. This was very frustrating and an unacceptable situation.

The good news is that by pressing the back button on the CD player a few times, setting the track number on the CD player to 99, disables the CD text capability and allows the DICE to just play audio through the head unit. It means I no longer can read the current playing track on the face of the head unit, but that’s an acceptable loss if I can still use the nav to figure out where I am at any given time.

So far I give the DICE a thumbs up. The install was painless, the audio quality sounds good, and it’s nice to be able to control the iPod using the iPod’s interface instead of navigating by using head unit controls. My Alpine stereo made it possible to navigate the whole iPod through the head unit controls, but it was extremely awkward to do so. With the DICE I am able to skip forward and backward songs though using the Cooper’s steering wheel controls though, which I love. Particularly when shuffle the entire contents of the iPod.

I’m actually looking forward to my commute tomorrow. =)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.