Learn: Home » Apple's iPod™ Hits the Road with Alpine
An iPod for every car?
These days it seems everybody's plugged into an iPod. Duke University has equipped its entire freshman class with iPods that have been preloaded with school calendars, campus maps, and classroom information. Newsweek's July 26 cover story proclaimed Apple's portable MP3 player a "life-changing cultural icon."
"Life-changing" or not (are you really defined by your iPod?), the iPod's appeal does seem to cross cultural boundaries; it's adored equally by the young and the old, by men as much as by women, by "first adopter" technophiles and "last-to-touch-it" technophobes. And, in perhaps the greatest testament to the iPod's acceptance, it has managed to bridge the chasm between the fanatically devoted cult of Mac users and their sworn enemies who use Microsoft's Windows operating system (and happen to constitute about 97% of the computer-using world).
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KCA-420i iPod Interface Adapter: Panacea or partial-solution?
Alpine deserves credit for refusing to push out an early, less functional adapter in order to capitalize on the manic sales of iPods over the past year. Instead of cashing-in quickly, Alpine's engineers and product developers thought through the unique challenges of using an iPod while driving, and addressed the primary concerns of iPod owners: providing an easy way to control and charge the iPod while on the road, yet preserving and even enhancing sound quality.
The KCA-420i iPod Interface Adapter will be a huge hit with Podsters and Alpine owners alike. The simple, two-cable installation and built-in power charging capacity makes the KCA-420i the most elegant and powerful iPod adapter solution yet developed. While the display of playlists and song titles may still be too limited for some iPod enthusiasts, QuickSearch offers fast, safe access to songs while driving. Most significantly, Bass Engine sound shaping controls and MediaXpander technology make iPod tunes played on an Alpine in-dash receiver sound fuller and richer than when played through other in-car adapters.
It may not be the universal in-car solution that iPod fans have been clamoring for, but for iPod fanatics that own a 2004 Ai-NET Alpine head unit, the KCA-420i does something truly revolutionary: it cures the perfect portable's road blues.
