I was getting my car serviced and one of the things I did to waste time was to drop in at Northfield. I currently have a Panasonic HU which looks great but has had a few issues over the last year and usually has an iPod plugged into the auxilary input. I happened to check out Alpine's range of iPod enabled HU's and I think I'm going to get one. Not cheap but a) it supports the iPod natively, b) looks very nice for an Alpine HU, c) will match the rest of the Alpine hardware in the car and d) will look more in place than the silver one I have presently.

I think this is the one I like the look of:
http://www.alpine.com.au/products/product4.asp?id=229

Only dissapointment is going from 5 volt preouts to 2 volt preouts but knowing Alpine, their 2 volts is probably underrated and at peak where as Panasonics could well have been at a particular point and not rated in the same manor.

Here is someone elses experience with them. Might be useful. :D

Alpine I-pod (http://www.caraudioaustralia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=60443)

Yeah, I mist admit that the dude there couldn't work out how to use it fully and it didn't look that flash. I might plug it into it's aux input too :bowrofl:

I know a guy who is running a CDA- 9X51 alpine ( cant remember the second number ) and it is hooked up to an Ipod. Works ok but he is always complaining when he uses the headunit to find songs, after searching for ages for any decent songs I knew why. Takes ages to load and is very fiddley but yeah.

Im thinking of hooking my palm pilot up to the headunit for movies and video clips since it runs of SD cards.

iPod connections are still in their infancy really. I'd wait for the new models to come out if you think they are a bit slow.

Most of the new HU's will be coming out with a USB port on them shortly. You will be able to plug in a 1GB or 2GB USB key into them and play music off theim directly. There are already a few of these on eBay, some even have an SD card slot so if you have SD cards, put those in and play music from them too.

The VE commodores will be coming out with sound systems with a USB port too.

It's funny / sad how Apple have bragged about how their devices use Firewire technology to connect to it yet transfer rates are no where near what Firewire can transfer at.

iPods are gennerally not interfaced by firewire... it is interfaced by USB most of the time.

IEEE1394 (firewire) is great but basically only for digital video (connecting your DV cam to your computer to download raw video / edit it down / burn to DVD).

You can also network by firewire, but is rare.

Firewire actually does get close to it's rated speed (400Mbit/sec) unlike USB2.0 (supposed to be 480Mbits/sec but never gets anywhere near that)

Firewire 800 is very very nice if you have a camera to support it. I have seen 4 hours of high-def DV tranferred to a dual G5 Mac in under 20 minutes which is startling if you know how many GB this actually is!

iPods are gennerally not interfaced by firewire... it is interfaced by USB most of the time.

IEEE1394 (firewire) is great but basically only for digital video (connecting your DV cam to your computer to download raw video / edit it down / burn to DVD).

You can also network by firewire, but is rare.

Firewire actually does get close to it's rated speed (400Mbit/sec) unlike USB2.0 (supposed to be 480Mbits/sec but never gets anywhere near that)

Firewire 800 is very very nice if you have a camera to support it. I have seen 4 hours of high-def DV tranferred to a dual G5 Mac in under 20 minutes which is startling if you know how many GB this actually is!

Yeah, firewire 800 is definately something apple can brag about. I have it on my powerbook, but sadly have never used it. iPods run f/w400 and usb2, and you can get firewire 800 cables for them, but they don't run that fast...which is a bit of a shame really. Good thing about f/w on the iPods is that u can charge it....
:redface:

iPods are gennerally not interfaced by firewire... it is interfaced by USB most of the time.
Yeah, I noticed that. I have both Firewire and USB cables but the new ones only come with a USB. It's great because I use the Firewire at home and the USB at work. There's no speed difference with the connection and when it takes 20 mins to upload half a gig of photos, you know that it's not reaching Firewire speeds.

Eek, the USB charges it too.

USB 2.0 tops out at about half it's rated 480Mbps or whatever it is with everything absolutely perfect (only thing plugged into that USB controller, no power requirement, etc etc)

Most of the time, you can expect 100-150Mbps out of USB 2.0

Firewire actually gets very close to it's rated 400Mbps... I have had 387.6Mbps myself, I know others that have cracked 390 (just).

And yes, USB will power/charge a connected object.