Rayner Commits Deep Geek Crashage Upon Lovely Ordnance

You know, the ONLY way to be righteous upon t’internet is to deliver upon promises, demonstrably. It is what the whole feedback thing is about upon sales sites like eBay. And I was a little rash this week in stating fatly (I’m very furry yet, so I avoid, ‘˜baldly’) that I would deliver a review of the £700 odd dual-brained entertainment and information powerhouse that is the Clarion Double DIN NX502E.
Dead feminine in nature, she really can do two things at once and has a really gorgeous spec and sounds like a unit you could use to run a sound-off system.
But I crashed her pants.. all the way back to THIS:

Which, as you can see, is a full on actual Windows CE Operating System desktop screen. I found that I could click upon the icons showing and stuff would open up, but I had utterly smargle flarped the Clarion Graphical User Interface. What happened was this.
I plugged in the MASS of all-differentially-shaped-by-tiny-detail pluggerators, as there are at least six of these. They are made loose as against trailing cords, so you can have EPIC connectability, yet not eat cubic behind what is a totally full size double-DIN head unit if you don’t have the need for it all and no space to shove it in. You get clusters for RCAs in and out for Audio and Vision, including rear seat monitor and rear camera. There’s the ability to connect to DAB as well via the DAB 302E add-on box.
I chucked it into the lovely demo rig and powered up my laboratory 12V power supply by Diawa, the PS304 MkII and started to mess about.
I played CD, I played DVD. I fired the moving image via a yellow RCA to the rear video output that’s plugged into the test bench’s NESA drop-down screen. I plugged my iPod Touch 4th Gen into the USB and found that while I needed a magical J-Link cable that has an iPod pluggy one end and a USB plus a yellow RCA composite video plug as well, to see video on the NX502E’s screen, I was fully able to boss tunes by artist, genre and song and album.
The screen is whizzy and fun to use as well as deeply desirable to look at. Then I tried a USB bean from Sandisk in the trailing-from-behind USB socket and found that while it would start to play my hippie music from Lanzarote in praise of Cesar Manrique, it never stopped saying ‘˜reading’ on the display. Then, I wiped an SD card of 2GB clean and threw three albums and a couple of videos on to it. The unit read the tracks’ listings but not only wouldn’t play them, it locked and only a full reboot power-down/power-up would get you going again.
So I call Clarion’s Tefal-Heads (very high foreheads to keep large frontal lobes in) and they kindly send me a link. I happily download a zip file and extract it. Stuff it into a microSD and follow the How To’s to update, one lobe at a time.
Trouble is, she didn’t reboot automatically after the MPU was duly updated, to the accompaniment of a very neat on screen graphic, so I restarted manually. But, even with use of the magical RESET button, prodding with the toothpick of my Swiss Army Knife, I failed to get owt bar that mobile devices’ operating system’s desk screen.
I actually don’t have issues with modern devices (when zackly, did a car radio become a ‘˜device?’) needing software upgrades all the time. As I have a tiny inkling of just how hard it is to make it perfect the first time. And Microsoft and Apple alike, tend to sell stuff with bugs in. But in this case, I think I messed up!
However, the crucial thing is, I also got to review the level of technical expertise there is at head office for Clarion in the UK.. and that is utterly top end.
Oh and as for the 3.5mm front full A/V input jack on tip/ring/ring/sleeve socketty style, it works a treat with my Sony MP3 Walkman. The same one that was so weedy on the Alpine UTE mechless player, is on this much more expensive machine, a whole world louder and more able to be amplified. The volume rotary has MANY steps to get to full volume, so is far more refined than most digital volume knobs and the output I could get from the little Walky thing was way impressive.
But alas, I have confused the machine that can spin a DVD, playing its sounds and pictures to the kids in the back, while playing stuff off USB doodad, SD card or else an iPloppy of any kind. I have sent it insane
It’s OK, she’s going home for some rehab treatment (clever firmware prommer thingy?) and Talk Audio is getting another go.
Just wanted to assure you, I WAS working, honest. Review soon but it is looking good for SQ and features. Issa Pepperami job!
Adam