My new knobless car stereo worked beautifully…except that it couldn’t keep time. The LCD clock display was erratic from the beginning. For the first day or two it was gaining five minutes per day. Then the whole thing reset to January 1 at midnight. I set it again to the current date and time. It ran fast for a couple more days. Then it reset itself again. Nothing was done to the car in that time frame, so it wasn’t that the battery was disconnected from the stereo.
It was just a lemon. So I invoked the 30-day warranty and took it back.
Yesterday I had them swap it out for a Sony XAV-601BT. I’m watching its clock (and everything else) but so far it’s glitch-free. Oh–and it has a volume control knob! It can do hands-free Bluetooth phone wrangling, and a lot of other stuff I haven’t figured out yet. But in addition to all that, it has a USB port on the front panel. That means I can plug a thumb drive right into the stereo itself, and not into a wire dangling off the back of it.
Of course, having bent more than one thumb drive by careless use, I wanted to be sure that a casual hand-wave wouldn’t destroy a drive with every damned MP3 I own on it. So I bought me a thumb drive unlike any other: The 16GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit. Once you plug it into something, the part that sticks out isn’t quite 1/4″ long.
Dude! Where’s the rest of my thumb drive? But no, that’s all there is. It’s just a bump on the stereo front panel.
The stereo is still on probation, of course, but I’m thinking this one is a keeper. More as it (hopefully doesn’t) happen.
Most of those micro-USB thumbdrives are just an adapter with a microSD card inside.
http://images.mobilefun.co.uk/graphics/productmisc/35146/1.jpg
I picked up one of those thumb drives, the ridiculous little 4GB model, for backing up a few key files. It’s beautiful. Sigh… technology. I remember when it cost 15 times more for a set of eight chips making up 16KB, and each of those chips was larger than this thumb drive.