S. Shelton Say: Kenwood KIV-BT901
A digital media receiver must support digital media devices, 2012-02-04
This review is for: Kenwood KIV-BT901
I recently upgraded from the KDC-MP745U which is a predecessor to the BT901. Both devices share a similar design and UI, so my review will make references to this as it comes along.PROS:1) It has a bright and clear screen. I love the screen2) The Bluetooth capabilities were impressive. Although this is my first Bluetooth device capable of interacting with my phone, I was impressed with how easy it was to setup and use. My voice transmitted strong too.3) Support for a UBS hub which, IMHO, should be standard on these devices especially ones labeled as media receivers. Oddly enough this is apparently somewhat rare.4) Zillions of audio control features are available and the settings are presented intuitively.CONS:1) No mute button (but you can now press and hold the source switch button to shut it off completely)2) The old player made it difficult enough to switch between AM & FM, and the favorites were a little cumbersome to reach, but the BT901 makes it worse by trying to make it better. Before you had one list of radio station favorites but now you have 2 separate lists: 1 for FM and another for AM and you can only view the favorites of the current setting you are listening to. Also, the dedicated favorites button is gone so now you have to hunt around in menus to find it.3) UBS devices are still weighed down with unnecessary limitations in the total number of folders on a drive and a maximum number of files in a folder, but, fortunately, the limits have been increased from the older player.4) While the UI is largely easy to understand, it is not easy to use while driving. Some of this stuff is settings you'll rarely change, but jumping to new locations in your music library and switching between radio, FM, AM, and everything needs to be streamlined because that's the stuff you're going to use while driving. Changing from FM to AM shouldn't require anything close to the number of steps that are required.5) Flash Drive support is incredibly poor. With some drives the receiver will never recognize the flash drive until it's unplugged and reinserted. Others will randomly shut off in the middle of a song, reload, and resume. Sometimes after starting the vehicle the player will show that it's playing a song, only there's no audio or waveform on the display so clearly it's not actually playing anything. These problems are the main reason I've labeled this player unacceptable.Kenwood support was not very useful because it was basically a game of "blame the user". According to them, the headunit wasn't recognizing one device upon startup because an MP3 it hadn't read was corrupt and prevented the drive from being read. The drive's LED never even blinked, but that's the reason. Interesting. Apparently after causing the drive to fail, this naughty MP3 goes dormant since it will play if I remove and reinsert the chip. They claimed the other errors were caused by 320kps MP3s exceeding the 320 limit and causing the player to fail. I've been using MP3s for years and I have seen broken MP3s, but I have never seen an MP3 cause the device to lose recognition of the drive it was being read from.Based on the comments I've read about ZUNE capabilities, I'm afraid the industry is treating headunits as being nothing but pass-through devices for iPod/iPhones. I'm afraid that all other storage devices (whether a full-fledged player like ZUNE or a storage-only device like a flash drive) will only be given superficial treatment. Call me crazy but I do not want to buy another music playback device so that my truck's music playback device can play music.The KIV-BT901 has the ability to update its firmware, but I've been through this game before. They've got my money and now it's time to move on to bigger and better things. Others have complained about the terrible ZUNE capabilities, and have they fixed that? Exactly. As much as I would love to have this player, if it ain't workin' now it ain't gonna work tomorrow. Sorry BT901 but you've gotta go home.

Jesse Say: Kenwood KIV-BT901
Beware to Zune lovers, 2011-09-21
This review is for: Kenwood KIV-BT901
BassVillain sums up this unit very nicely. I just want to give a heads up to anyone who thinks they might purchase this item based on it's Zune compatibility as I did. I hooked up my 120GB Zune with almost 100GB worth of music. After taking a very long time to load, the in-dash control worked very nicely. It wasn't before long I noticed when in album mode, it plays the songs in alphabetical order. This may not be a big issue for some, but you will already be sacrificing CD's in your car to have this receiver. It's nice to still retain some integrity of the old CD's you used to love, and play the songs in the order you know by heart or the how the artist intended. Then I realized that every album was only about 70% complete, as I was missing every song from about "R" to "Z". Kenwood tech support claims if I "wait long enough" every song should load, I have not found this to be true. They also suggested the song order info wasn't supported by iPods either, which I also found not to be true. You may not have these issues with a ZuneHD but I wouldn't risk it. I wouldn't have paid the extra money for this unit if I had known that it wouldn't live up to its claims.