# Review of Dice Electronics i-VW-CAN Silverline



## JesusDoesVegas (Sep 25, 2008)

My 2007 GTI came with the indash 6 disk player, with sat under the passenger seat, and aux jack in the glove box. I used the aux jack for a few months, but I really wanted something better. What I really desired was a product that would charge my Ipod, display song info, and keep the Ipod locked away in the glove box out of view of would be thieves, all the while allowing me to scan my very organized and sizable library of about 9000 songs. My ideal product was the dension unit, but as many of you know its a little hard to get a hold of. I saw the Dice Electronics i-VW-CAN Silverline unit on enfig, and after I read on these boards that it did indeed show info on both the mfd and the head unit, I decided it would be a worthy substitute. I was wrong.
I ordered it from Enfig, and they shipped it right away, with no issues. I would definitely order from them again, however I have to say there is very little info on this product on their site. Other products seem to have pretty good descriptions, and their people have a decent presence on this forum as far as I can tell.
The install was easy, with the help of the guide in the MKV forums. It looks a lot more difficult that it was, I have absolutely no experience with this kind of thing, and I did fine. The guy in the guide used a special tool to pry all the parts off, but an old gift card worked fine. Just go slow, and be careful not to break anything, and don't put the key in the car until you have the airbag hooked back up.
With all that out of the way, onto the product its self. It does what it says it will. It charges my ipod classic, and locks the controls, so i can lock it in the glovebox and i dont have to worry about volume changing or anything like that if it brushes up against the crap I have in there. When the car is turned off, it does stop the Ipod, and text does show up on one line on the HU and MFD, and you can navigate the ipod from the HU. The implementation of this is so bewilderingly slow and complicated that it makes the product rather unusable.
My Ipod is very well organized. I'm a completist, and an organization freak. I don't really do shuffle, and I dont do playlists. My listening habbits usually involve picking an artist and then an album... pretty simple. The problem is, this unit is so slow, it makes picking an artist then an album a headache. I could go on about this, but why not watch the video....
In this video I start at artist "Tom Waits" I want to choose artist "Battles", album "Mirrored", and song "Layendecker". This seems like a real world scenario, and a good test of the navigation. As you can see it takes about a minute and 25 seconds to get to what I want. This is parked, with all attention on the radio... Now imagine doing this while the car is moving, or at a stop light (don't tell me you haven't tried changing cds or fiddled with the radio while the car is moving, i know you shouldn't, but we all do)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WShjZkqm5JM 
As you can see the screen doesn't move in real time with the tune knob, so you really have no idea where you are as you spin the knob, and you have to wait about a second for it to catch up once you've stopped turning to see where you are. Also if you don't have something particular in mind, and just feel like scanning the artists until something good comes to mind you are out of luck, as this would take a very long time. If the screen scrolled the artists as you went along, this would be a much better product. 
Also if you notice, I have to change play lists to choose my artist, album and track. This was annoying at first, but you get used to it. The problem is, as far as I can tell, the steering wheel controls don't change through artists/albums/tracks, but changes the play list. So they are pretty much useless. I seem to think at one point I was able to get the steering wheel controls do change through songs etc, but I cannot get this to happen again. 
So in closing, for those of you wanting a replacement for the dension unit, this isn't it. I would stick with the stock aux jack until something better comes along.

_Modified by JesusDoesVegas at 3:25 PM 10-26-2008_


_Modified by JesusDoesVegas at 3:28 PM 10-26-2008_


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