Pioneer AVIC-X910BT 5.8-Inch In-Dash Navigation A/V Receiver with DVD Playback and Bluetooth

I read the reviews and thought I could deal with the laggy, long startup and overall unresponsiveness of the unit. I was wrong.

- Forget about the reverse camera. The unit takes so long to boot, that you will be out of the parking space before the camera is ready to use.
- My vote for the worlds worst GPS navigation system. I have ended up 1/4 mile or more from where the GPS thought I was going. Annoying 2 mile, then 1 mile, then another alert, and then another alert.
- If the street number has a letter in it, forget it.
- Laggy start times. It is just plain painful.
- Bluetooth reception is horrible. I'm not sure if it is the mic provided or the unit itself.
- Clock is in a different location depending on what screen/mode you are in. Upper left corner, then upper right corner in another menu. They can't even get this right.
- No street names in 3D view.
- No firmware updates since February 2010.

I very much regret purchasing this unit. You get what you pay for.

I bought this unit because I needed a nav unit to replace my Tomtom with traffic. Sad to say, the Pioneer never came close. I had Bluetooth in my factory stereo, the Pioneer unit improved on it with a nice display, but lost out in sound quality.

My Tomtom's graphics is nice and even offers Advance Lane Guidance (Garmin calls it Junction View). The Pioneer does not.

My free Tomtom FM RDS-TMC traffic updates quite quickly and recalculates my route and shows me traffic on route on the right side of the screen.. The Pioneer has MSN Direct traffic but I often found myself driving STRAIGHT INTO traffic, even if the unit KNOWS there is a jam on route. It doesn't show you traffic until you are in it!

I bypassed the unit to allow GPS inputs on the fly. Even so, the screen taps can be so laggy that it almost gets frozen and extremely frustrating. When it starts lagging, EVERYTHING lags, including phone calls. Incoming calls can't be answered. Outgoing calls are connected at the phone, but no audio comes in through the unit. This can be DANGEROUS as you are distracted by trying to answer the phone manually. I sometimes feel like punching the screen in!

I sent the unit back to Pioneer for service with the complaint of slow response, but it came back as "no problems found".

I finally sold it on eBay and put my TomTom back in my car with my factory stereo.

Lost about $400. Now even though Amazon is having what seems like a killer deal on the newer X920BT, I'm not touching it! The new unit now needs a separately purchased traffic receiver for MSN Direct which will terminate it's services anyway by Jan 2012. And their nav graphics is identical to this unit... So no go for me.

Overall a very good Navigation Receiver and looks really nice at night. Basic navigation works good. Touch screen is very responsive. DVD playback is nice and the sound quality is great.
The only negative I can find is the start-up time is slower than some other navigation radios. From time to time the EQ button disappears from the touch screen but comes back after rebooting. Screen doesn't tilt and is not clearly visible on sunny days.

I bought this unit in March and called Pioneer customer service several times now and they are either not informed about the product or just lying to me to run the warranty past its limit..The clock on the unit due to a software problem displays the wrong time. I have called customer service and they kept telling me that the engineers were working on it..that is until last time. This tech must not be a happy employee because he really treated me like I was a pain in the you know what. The maps on the display are pretty lean on info. The graphics are washed out and boring. Also if you add the sirius radio option good luck on guessing what your presets are as it does not display the info, It just says preset 1,2, etc. Also you will be half way to wherever you are going before the unit is fully booted up.It can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 6 minutes for the unit to be fully operational on start up. About one out of every 10 times the unit will also hang on boot up so if you want to listen to music or see where you are, you had better find a parking lot so you can shut your car off and restart it.

When the unit works, it works almost satisfactorily, but its always a crap shoot and if you want to know what time it is you had better be wearing a watch because the clock is not correct and apparently Pioneer doesn't know how to fix it. On the plus side the sound quality is really quite good. You may be better off buying just a stereo and a portable GPS. I had a lowrance portable gps that was far superior to this and it was 3 years old. Good luck if you buy it and it doesn't work getting pioneer to do anything about it! I think they are selling them with defective software so when the map upgrade comes out they can put the fix in the new maps and charge you! Having purchased Pioneer products in the past I was expecting a better product than this! Quite disappointing

I bought this deck and have spent 3 trips to the installer changing converters and the antenna. They even tried to add on the HD radio instead. It's pretty bad when the stock Mercedes stereo delivered a basic service like FM than the Pioneer. If FM is a consideration for you i would suggest getting another manufacture's system.