Review: Alpine Blackbird Portable Navigation System

October 2006 By —Brett Solomon

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The Alpine Blackbird is a Lilliputian little nav system. A large well-made controller on the right is flanked by a 3.6” LCD screen on the left with 16.7 million possible colors. The controller allows you to zoom in and out on the map, and also flip-flop between navigation and music functions. The little screen is a touchscreen, and Alpine has taken into consideration that sometimes clumsy fingers will be operating the unit. Therefore, when the touchscreen prompts you to press a button, it is a little larger than on other Alpine units making it easy for the end user. It differs from other competitors’ systems that can be insanely frustrating trying to tap a tiny GUI button with the corner of your fingernail. The Blackbird comes with a Lithium polymer rechargeable battery pack that Alpine recommends charging up fully the first time. Additionally, the Blackbird comes with a cradle and DC power cord so the unit can be charged in-car from the cigarette lighter socket. You can use the Blackbird on its internal battery for about two hours before it dies. This way you can grab the Blackbird out of your car and bring it along without the hassles of bringing along power cords and mounting cradles if a directionally-challenged friend picks you up.

Powering up the unit for the first time, it took about four minutes to get a fix on the satellites and then bring up the appropriate map of my community. This procedure is typical for most portable nav units. In the front of the owner’s manual, a procedure is given to reboot the system using a tiny button and a paper clip as a tool. I thought this was rather odd to be in the front of the owner’s manual rather than buried in the back of the troubleshooting section. No problem—let’s forget about this minutia and hit the road! No sooner had I said that, I got as far as the end of my neighborhood and the Blackbird locked up. I mean it froze to the point where even the power switch would not shut the unit off.

Even though off to a rocky start, the unit performed well for day-to-day activities. Alpine’s robust Point-of-Interest database is among the most current in the world of navigation systems and can be the difference between finding the nearest location of your bank or one in a town 300 miles away. I also love the way the Alpine uses its brain when you input an address or a point-of-interest. By narrowing the search area down to the town level, the unit quickly narrows down search choices for streets so inputting your destination is not a hassle.

The Alpine accepts MP3 or WMA music files from an SD or MMC card. The unit could not be simpler to access your music, but I had a problem with the strength of the output from the FM Modulator/Transmitter. Although you have your choice of 12 different radio frequencies to choose from, I could not find a station that did not have a lot of background static at lower volume levels.

All portable units do a good job, but the long boot-up time of the Blackbird versus instantaneous twist-the-key-and-go of a hardwired unit makes me salivate for the latter. If I was a business traveler who had a hardwired Alpine-based navigation system in my daily driver, the Blackbird would be a great addition when I was traveling in a rental car or in a friend’s car. yy