Alpine Blackbird PMD-B100
Alpine Electronics has unveiled a new GPS navigation system, the Alpine Blackbird PMD-B100. The system uses NAVTEQ maps displayed on a 3.6 inch LCD touchscreen. Maps of the USA and Canada take you to any address or to any POI in the database of over 6 million. The device can also double as a music player and can read MP3, WAV, and WMA files. The device comes with a remote control and is powered by a 16 channel GPS receiver. An FM traffic receiver is built-in. Alpine also has a flash movie demo of the Blackbird PMD-B100.
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I bought a Blackbird 2 days ago and took it back to the store yesterday. I was really disappointed with the display and the accuracy of the GPS information. The display washed out terribly in the bright sunlight and was very hard to see. The writing was too small and I had to concentrate too hard on that instead of driving. Secondly, the display showed that I was about 700 feet behind where I really was. Not a big deal if I’m in my hometown (where I don’t need GPS navigation) but an extremely big deal if I’m driving the backroads/hills of Pennsylvania.
Thanks for the first hand comments, Michael. I’m surprised to hear the GPS accuracy was poor. With a 16 channel receiver the accuracy ought to be much better than that.
I haven’t had a chance to use the Blackbird yet, so I don’t have any suggestions for your other concerns. Certainly some GPS devices have much better quality screens than others which make them easier or more difficult to see in glare situations. Some GPS systems like the TomTom GO Series offer glare sheilds to help make the screen more readable in high light situations.
Thanks for sharing your comments! Feel free to drop a line with thoughts on whatever device you replace the Blackbird with.
I bought the Blackbird at Best Buy in Alpharetta, GA. Had it for one day and returned the unit. Accuracy was off by 100 yards, would say to turn after you had missed your road. I bought the Tom Tom 910 afetr the return. Alpine is just not ready.
Before I share my opinion let me say a few things about the numerous reviews I read before I purchased my Blackbird. I believe Alpine committed a disservice by releasing a unit that clearly was not ready for the market. Bad press is hard to overcome. Most of the shortcomings expressed by individuals and trusted online consumer research sites were justified. The unit exhibited slow performance, slight inaccuracies and poor battery life to name a few. However, Alpine is a trusted name in electronics and one has to believe that they would not do permanent damage to their brand by leaving an inferior product on the market. Alpine’s commitment to offer the public a worthy product was demonstrated by the 3 updates released. I believe that after a long wait (albeit not perfect, but what product is) the Blackbird is ready to compete with its competition. It would have been nice (and definitely avoided a lot of negative comments) had Alpine R&D not given into corporate pressures to place a not-ready-for public-consumption product on the market. I hope they (Alpine) have learned a lesson. Now on to my review….
I’ve owned this unit for about 3 months now and just completed the latest update released in September. Improvements I’ve noticed are more accurate tracking of the vehicle, quicker position fix, off road position (i.e. parking lots) now displayed in longitude & latitude and faster re-routing. In short…the unit does what it was designed to do.
There are a few flaws but in my opinion not a deal breaker. For instance the touch control panel of the MP3 player has every requisite control icon except…STOP (the little square). To place the player in stop mode you must tap one of the folder buttons repeatedly until you reach the end; and then the display reads…STOP. How Alpine missed that I’ll never know. Having to accept the EULA every time the unit is powered on is annoying. Alpine could have given us the ability to accept it once and then turn it off; or a better use for the start-up would have been to allow one to enter a personal unlock code to render the unit useless against theft (assuming you’d leave the unit visible when you leave your vehicle).
I discovered that the 6 million POI’s may be bogus; as I have found double entries for POI’s. The only difference was that one POI entry included a phone number and the other didn’t (that could be the case with the units of other manufacturers as well). Battery life could be better especially if you want to use the unit as a portable MP3 player. In my opinion there are other “toys†designed for MP3 playback that make more sense…let’s face facts…this is a portable GPS unit first. I found that with a little work Velcro will hold the unit in place on my dash and I don’t have that huge suction cup device, thingy blocking my view. Curiously, the traffic function only works when the unit is powered by the cigarette lighter.
The manual is incomplete on page 13 where under “Switching Map Display†it refers you to page 27 for more instructions and there aren’t any??? On page 30 there is no mention of how to place the MP3 player in stop mode (although I discussed how earlier).
Bottom-line…it’s a slick unit for the price, useable GPS, portable and MP3’s sound good with the right set of ear buds. I snagged mine for $700 (including tax) with an additional 2 years of warranty. I’d recommend this unit for its looks alone…Naaaa. But it does look sharp!
A friend of mine who purchased this unit received his free DVD update program from Alpine and upgraded the software and mapping database in his Blackbird. He’s much happier with it now and says that overall, GPS performance has improved, the system is much faster, and the new traffic information feature is extremely useful to him the Los Angeles area. Alpine did turn lemons into lemonade!
Before the upgrade, I was a bit leery about purchasing it because of the performance issues he was experiencing and of bad reviews on the internet. My previous experience was with a Magellan Roadmate 700 and Garmin 2720 and in comparison, I thought the unit was quite slow. However, after the upgrade and the recent price reduction to $499 (which annoyed my friend a little bit because he had purchased it at $699), I decided to buy it from Best Buy.
I really like the Traffic Information feature. It shows red squares along the highway when speeds are in the 0-10 mph range and yellow diamonds along the highway when in the 15-30 mph range. Much better view of traffic flow than other systems I’ve seen that only highlight the road segments. Also, traffic incidents are displayed as icons and you can see construction events, accidents, debris on road and other interesting things. My 90 day free trial of traffic is not finished yet, but I definitely plan on spending the $60/year to subscribe to traffic information. This is something that really helps me drive to and from work every single day! Talk about stress savings!
Definitely worth the $499 I spent on it. And I agree with ajtrek…it sure does look quite sharp in person!
Mark
My unit keeps locking up and won’t shut down. Screen freeze up. I’am totally hate this unit. I use there docking unit in to my Alpine head unit IVA-W200.I also remove the battery many times to reset the unit.Do not buy this gps unit from Alpine. The unit is PMD-B100T.I have own Alpine products for over 30 years. This is the worst. my gps is three weeks old.
Pure crap!!!! I bought this thing on Friday and returned it on Monday. I didn’t believe there was such thing as an inferior Alpine product, but I found it. Battery life is pitiful, tracking wasn’t accurate, Traffic feature was ok, and the map was nothing fancy. I bought this to use it with my Alpine W200, but didn’t have it long enough to buy the dock. I bought a Garmin Nuvi350 and love it, even though I can’t use it with the w200. Surely Alpine will do better with the PMD-B200 because it couldn’t be worse than the B100.
I had this unit for few months. It freeze often and need a battery removal to reset. The support from Alpine is the worst I ever seen, they simple lie to you if you call and claim that problems are features or dimisse them as minor (like random reset of the unit during routing just before a turn. The destination is lost when this happen). And the only recommendation to fix problems that I got from Alpine is to reset the unit each time. The traffic function is really bad: most of the time in only display constructions site and not the traffic (Alpine claim that this is a problem with radio connectivity but I take the same route every that for one (I get the traffic data about 50% of the times) and when I look at the status page the unit claim to have connectivity. The unit to not use the traffic for routing, you have to select an option on the screen for detour and if it happen that during the detour routes the unit need a reroute the route is recalculated without using the traffic (this is a feature according to Alpine, I could not get the guy to explain me how this can be a feature).
The unit also lack many features that garmin added in firmware updates to there nuvi units.
I do not recommend this GPS and will not buy another alpine product anymore.
I recently purched a Blackbird GPS unit. I, like many others, read the various reviews and was somewhat amazed at the negativity in those reviews, with several basically calling it nothing more than a piece of junk. I have only had the unit a few days but I happen to live in a fairly rural area where some of the streets aren’t even listed on maps, etc. I went thru the intruction manual and proceeded to program my own address into the unit. It responded by placing the arrow right smack at where my home is located. I then programmed in my girlfriends address and decided to drive over to her place to see if the unit could get me there. Well, it did with kudos. It was very accurate and as I finished the trip and turned onto her short street the voice announced that I was at my destination just as I pulled up in front of her house. Now that is accuracy IMHO. Today I was coming back from a trip into the city and was approaching an interesection after negotiating several miles of curvy roads. As my truck came to a stop to make a left turn, the arrow was positioned right at the intersection I was going to turn left at. Again, this to me is accuracy. I am going to Canada next week on an extended trip and will be anxious to see how it works out on the open road, but if the past few days are any indication of how it is going to work, then either Alpine has done some major revamping and upgrading of the Blackbird OR a few out there that claim it is junk simply don’t know how to use it correctly. I have used Alpine products for years and would recommend the Blackbird to anyone looking for not only an accurate GPS unit but one that also looks pretty darn good while being accurate.
They should call it the brownbird because my unit turned brown. traffic is terrible it never works when im stuck in traffic. doesnt reconize some streets,and gets stuck and have to reset unit dont buy this product
I have had the Blackbird for 5 days. I used it for a short trip from Canada to the States and back. It worked great. Never froze up and was quite accurate. My problem was in the inital purchase. The first one I recieved had parts missing. The second that replaced it had a broken connection for the lighter. The third one, the store claimed it was brand new and never out of a box, I discovered it was. Anyhow once I got the thing up and running it seemed to work great. I feel satisfied so far. We will see.
I bought this unit back in ‘06. It was CRAP! Had to do extensive research to find out about the OS update (and not form their site). After finally getting the update disk I find out I had to buy the optional external power cord because the battery is crap and the update of the unit takes an hour.
Though I must say that after the update, the unit worked better.
But now, a year later I get this PROMPT! “Your map and POI database is over 1 year old…please go to alpine…to PURCHASE a database update”. FREAKIN preprogrammed SPAM on the GPS!! And another prompt to get through, as if the first one isn’t bad enough. And to beat all that, the previous site for updates now redirects you to the faq page. So there is no way to get an update (as the faq says you can) and no information on how to get rid of the “update” SPAM/prompt. I have spent a lot of money on many Alpine products, including the lack-luster IVA-W200 head unit. But after putting up with no support for the PMD-B100 (I guess they want people to buy the new PMD-B200 / Yea-right, after this crap?), it’ll be a long LONG time before I turn an eye towards ANY MORE of their junk.
I bought the Blackbird in spring 2007 when they were talking about an upgrade - so far, I haven’t been able to find the VERY long promised upgrade - if anybody knows a website, please post it.
The unit is very poor - when in the UK, I use a Tom Tom and it’s fantastic - accurate, 3 dimensional, up to date, address by post code and a readout of mph over the posted speed limit.
Unfortunately, the Blackbird I use in North America does none of this. Plan display only, tortuous address entry, no speed limit info and a highway database way out of date. Last weekend I spent an hour navigating around Savannah before I realised that the bridge I needed to take wasn’t even in the Blackbird database. What’s worse, their website is a mess and you never get to the link page when you click on updates
What a poor product from a major supplier. I’ll never buy their products again
I got mine with my new vehicle in July 2007.
Went online to register and at that time was sent an update DVD in the mail to update it.
Been Happy with it… Have experienced the Freeze Glitch where the Battery has to be removed to reboot it. And I did once get a message telling me my database was out of date. Again removing the battery to reboot fixed that. Another time it had some sort of error botting and I found I was in windows ce , but nothing could be executed except the GPS program that was in the start up. Have tried to get back in there again and never can.
WOOHOO! Finally a Map update for the b100. Released April 08. Looks like it also has a sfotware update the now has a true 3d map like the newer b200
http://www.alpine-usa.com/US-en/products/product_software.php?model=PVD-B102%20Software%20Update
Has anyone tried the new update? I am curious as to the new ’software’ update. Right now you can NOT view small roads if you zoom out past the 1/2 mile zoom level making navigating small roads with a large view area impossible. It’s like looking at the screen from 2 inches away, you can’t see the bigger picture.
I too am curious to know if the update is worth $70. Considering all the bad reviews they should provide this update for free.
I’ve had mine for a year and a half and it’s been ok. Like others I don’t like how long it takes to get a signal and the fact that it freezes when using the MP3 player. Oh yeah, and the battery life is absolutely horrible.
Like I said, its ok but nothing special
I have owned my Blackbird for just under one year now and in some ways wish I had purchased one of the other major brands instead. It works, and for the most part gets me from point A to point B okay but I have had some problems with it in the time it has been in use. Went to Canada with it last Sept. and it froze up enroute so I never did get the chance to put it thru its paces then. Since, I have had some battery problems, the auto day/night feature stopped working and the routing it was giving me on several shorter trips was not accurate. I went to the dealer and he replaced the unit with a new one that does work better. Recently he called me and told me to come in and he would download the new upgrades, etc., which he did at no charge for all my earlier problems with the first unit. I, like many others, have been very high on Alpine and have owned several top of the line audio head units and speakers. I don’t feel this Blackbird unit is on a par with other brands such as Garmin and Tom Tom. I am not very happy with it overall and it was not a cheap unit either. I will continue to use it for now and will more than likely upgrade at some point to another brand. No way will I be purchasing the newer wide screen version as I doubt it will be any better, just a little bit bigger screen and more money. Sure a shame when a high end company like Alpine puts out an inferior product and then goes ahead and charges the customer for upgrades as they come along. Not right in my book………