Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Short review for those with attention deficit disorder:
Is the Eclipse AVN7000 worth two thousand dollars? Nope. Look elsewhere. There are a lot better ways to spend two grand.
Longer review:
Well, I purchased an Eclipse AVN7000 a couple days ago. I was very excited to get it installed in my new car. My options were limited, since I only had one DIN space to work with. So I chose the "top-of-the-line" AVN7000. Was it worth it? Nope.
Why, you ask? Well, I was expecting a feature rich, easy to use, well thought out and designed unit with all of the bells and whistles. What you get is another product that was rushed out the door, and forgotten about by the manufacturer.
The interface of this unit is clunky at best. There are very few buttons on the face of the unit - 10 buttons and a knob/button. That keeps it simple, but they managed to add several more on the touch screen itself - making me wonder why they put buttons on the face of the unit...?
The Nav button on the face only has one purpose: to jump you from wherever you are to the nav screen. While that is handy, I fail to see why it can't do something else while you're in Nav mode.
The Menu button takes you to an on-screen menu that is cryptic and poorly organized, and mostly to do with nav functions, NOT anything else. (I guess Fujitsu / Eclipse didn't really want you to use it as a stereo.)
The Display button controls the day/night dimming of the screen, or will turn the screen off altogether. Why you would want to turn it off I don't know, just close it! If you do turn it off, you'll wreck your car trying to figure out how to get it back on. You have to press the Nav button! Yeah, that's intuitive! Why not the Display button?!?
The Dest button brings up a menu of destination and Points of Interest (POI's). The menu looks easy to use, but is actually confusing. Just try to get it to show you the nearest gas station, and you'll know what I mean. You better pull over, because you're gonna be reading and "clicking" a lot to get it.
The Open/Close button controls the screen's tilt and will close the screen. Oddly, this button takes you to a menu where you can adjust tilt or close the screen. Am I the only person who thought you should just be able to tap the button and close the display? Nope, you have to hold it in for a second or two for the display to close.
The > buttons do the normal backward track and forward track skipping, like on most stereos. (Finally something standard!)
The ^ button ejects the CD or DVD you have inserted.
The volume knob is also a button, and it brings up a menu of all of the different options you have installed, such as CD, MP3 CD, DVD Movie, Rear View Camera, Side View Camera, etc. And you can easily switch between the functions. The volume knob can also be used to scroll through the functions when the display is closed. An odd abreviation of the function will appear on the stereo's mini display (not the big screen) when the screen is closed. The abbreviations are odd. CMP for an MP3 disc.
Sidetrack:
Who made that up? Why wouldn't you just use MP3? or even MP3 CD, the display has enough characters! I know that's nit-picky, but these are the things about this unit that just don't "sit right", and it's a good example of how the unit lacks "polish". These kinds of things could be easily avoided if the manufacturer had done some honest end-user trials with the unit before releasing it.
Back on track:
A power button is also available on the front, which works just as you would expect, it turns the audio portion off, but leaves the nav unit running and the display out and on.
One of my pet peeves about the unit is that the menus are not organized in any logical way. I know that sounds picky, but when I'm cruising down the highway at 70 mph, I don't need to be distracted pressing buttons, surfing menus, trying to find the option I'm looking for. There should be ONE menu button that takes you to a short menu of options, subdivided by category: nav, audio, configuration, etc. Then sub-menus as necessary. The current menus seemed to be organized from a designer's standpoint, and I'm sure they made perfect sense to the Fujitsu engineers. But we're not Fujitsu engineers. We're users. Make the menus make sense to normal people that just walked up to the device.
A word about the manual:
The manual that comes with the head unit is abyssmal. Yes, it tells you how to set a destination. How to switch between your audio CD and your memory stick (I'll get to the memory stick in a moment). But it doesn't answer ANY technical questions. You're left to trial and error and fudging your way through. Such as: The unit will read MP3 files from a CD-ROM or a memory stick. It also plays DVD movies. So why wouldn't it read DVD-ROM's with MP3's on them? Well, it doesn't. How hard would that be Fujitsu? Come on!
While surfing through the menus you'll notice that you can change the background image (wallpaper) or have it play an animation in the background - behind the menus. No where in the manual does it tell you HOW!
You'll also see in the menu's that you can configure the audio of the head unit. There are various controls, such as one that you set the type of vehicle it is in. The manual gives NO explanation of what this really means. A couple of the choices are: Compact and Small. What's the difference? We'll never know!
There's a section in the sound setup where you can set the crossover functions and speaker setup for your vehicle. There is NO explanation whatsoever in the manual of these functions. What choices should you make? What do the options really mean? Who knows!?!
Conclusion:
Overall, the MOST disappointing thing about this unit is the features that it is LACKING and that you would be expecting to have. Such as readily available and FREE nav data updates. After all, you're paying a premium price for this unit, it is insulting to charge for the updates. Well, there aren't ANY updates for this unit!! The data in the unit is from 2005, and there are no updates available!! The updates for other similar Eclipse units cost about three hundred dollars!!! Can you believe it! You can buy a LOT of copies of Microsoft Streets & Trips for that!
The nav data is also lacking in another horrible way. Some areas of the country only have "partial" data. You can see the streets and intersections on the map, but the computer can't navigate you in these areas. It just tells you the equivalent of "sorry, no data, too bad for you". Fortunately, the GPS still places you in the correct place on the map, it just can't tell you to "turn here" or route you around one-way streets or anything like that. To make that situation worse, there's NO WAY to tell an area with full data from an area with partial data!! You would think that it would be a different color or something. Another nice "feature" from Fujitsu. Thanks fellas!
On a personal note, I live smack-dap in the center of one of those partial data areas! So the device can't even navigate me to my own home! Of course, I know where I live, but it's just that more aggravating that a unit that costs this much does so little.
I mentioned Memory Sticks above. The unit will read Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo's (the MagicGate variety only) and ONLY the 128Mb or smaller! What!?! Yes, I said 128Mb or smaller. OK Fujitsu, what's that all about? Why Sony Memory Sticks? Why not the ubiquitous SD memory cards? Or even Compact Flash? Why the most expensive flash memory available? Why only 128Mb? What am I gonna do with that? My WATCH has more memory than that!! Ugh.
Well, I'm sure there are several other things I could complain about with this unit. I just hope I save at least ONE person from wasting there money on this clunky out-dated over-priced turd.
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Eclipse AVN7000 7-Inch HD Navigation System With Dvd/Ms Multi-Source Receiver
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