It Can’t Be! Alpine Puts Plug and Play Features Into 2007 Headunits
While not a ‘Plug and Play’ radio, Alpine is really eyeing those features, and is, surprisingly, the first company that will let you plug your plug and play radio into the headunit to use the features such as replay, or artist/song seek. Using the $80 adapter, you can plug in your radio to control it all from the Headunit. Search and preview what’s on other stations, add a song you like into SongSeek, and even getting the GameAlerts, it looks like this is a really cool interface.
The adapter will work for all 2007 Ai-NET head units, including models: CDA-9883, CDA-9885, CDA-9887, iDA-X001, IVA-D105, IVA-W205. The only thing we are not 100% sure of is whether you need a plug and play radio that uses the universal dock for it to work, but that will likely be the case.
Hopefully, this will lead to 2008 models being able to do all these features without needing a Plug and Play tuner, but rather just the Sirius tuner box, or even an integrated tuner.
XM tried a similar product in 2003 with the Skylink by Blitzsafe, but the product never made it to the market. Additionally, this looks to be a product that will still allow the PNP to be utilized, and not put into a big box.