I am certain I have the same unit as gsaff. I am goimg to check the iPod for power........ I was not aware that it may not be turning off. Mine is also connected to SAT, which is not a problem for me since I was not planning on adding it anyway. The manual states that it charges the iPod, could this be the reason it would stay on........and only draw current long enough to provide the charge ????? We have had the car for about 3 weeks, and have just left the iPod connected and in the compartment that is forward of the shifter......I have not looked at it since we connected it.

Part Number that Toyota dealer parts department gave me was PT4500082.....made by Alpine America......300.00 installed

 

Well, I just emailed the guy at the dealership I dealt with regarding the interface that Gulf States installed for me. I think they either installed it wrong or really jipped me on the actual interface that was installed. I was charged $299 to have it added at the port, and it's apparently not as functional as yours since I can't get the Artist/Albumn browsing capability to work.

I can see the ID3 tags fine, but I can only navigate through playlists, which is very annoying.

Thanks for the part number, I'm going to use that to help my case with the dealership so if they installed a different one, I'll ask for that part number instead.

 

I spoke to the dealer today and they confirmed that the Ipod was not drawing power when the car is off. I checked this by powering the Ipod off and plugging it when the car was off. The Ipod did not come on, so I guess that no power is being supplied. The Ipod does not, however, turn off when the car is off. The Ipod interface indicates that it is paused. This makes sense, in that the music resumes when the car is turned on (from the place where it left off when you turned the car off). This means that the Ipod is drawing power (at least some) from it's own battery, and that if you don't drive the car for a few days and leave the Ipod installed, then the battery will run down. I will experiment over the coming days. Otherwise very happy with the unit.

The owners manual does not give a part number or manufacturer - the front page jsut says "Interface Kit for Ipod. Note it does not list that the Iphone works with the Kit, but mine works fine.

 

the ipod will power itself down a few minutes after you turn off the car.

from apples website:

"When not playing music, iPod sleeps after a few minutes of inactivity. Sleep is the same as if you turned iPod off by pressing the Play/Pause button for a few seconds. To wake iPod from sleep, press any button and the iPod will wake quickly to the menu. By falling into sleep, iPod goes into a power conservation mode but can wake quickly.

If iPod sleeps while powered, the charging status appears on the screen. When iPod is not powered and sleeps, the screen is blank."

 

Thanks, also did some checking and found the same. Ipod goes to sleep in paused mode.

One issue I am having with the integration unit is that on the Nav, you can press ARTIST or ALBUM and search through them. But the search stops at 100 (goes back to 001). In my case with a 3O gig Ipod, this only scrolls through to D. I am not sure how to overcome this as it means that I can only get to some music through building playlists, which pretty much restricts you to only using the playlist feature to acccess your music (I would also guess that you cannot have more than 100 playlists - not that you would want to). For example I thought that I could overcome the restriction by choosing an Album that started with A (eg Actung Baby) and then from there get to all my U2 albums - did not work. So if I want to listen to any U2 albums that begin with a letter higher than D, I will need to set up either a U2 playlist or creat a playlist of that specific album.

Am I missing something?