Customer Reviews
Does the job, and could use more features 
2007-08-28
I also bought the Drive + Play 2, eager to enhance my song searching capabilities while driving and without looking down to do so. Mission accomplished!! This task is done very, very nicely. Congrats, HK! Slick look, and definitely a conversation piece in your car.
Installation can be very simple (using cigarette lighter power source), but best results is when you hide all cables under the dash, and that requires a little more knowlege than the average driver. If you don't know, have it installed by qualified tech. I also left the ipod permanently hidden under the dash, completely filled with my favorite classics (very seldom need to update). As an option you can also leave the ipod in the glove compartment, but you may loose it there, while unattended. For fixed installation such as mine, I recommend you use an ipod that is not a Video Ipod, because the video files cannot be played on screen (at least not yet), hence no use for such features here, maybe for more storage space (60 & 80 GB models, but for that matter, use an USB HD instead - disclamer: I have not tested USB HDs yet).
I agree with other reviews, the included FM modulator has interference throughout the entire FM band. You loose a star here HK! I was forced to use it with noise until I finally got a special cable to input sound from Drive + Play 2 (an auxiliary 3.5 mm minijack) to the CD changer input of the factory car stereo (my case, a Clarion CE-Net input). The final result: Outstanding sound quality. One should never use FM modulation anyways, if sound quality is your thing (you loose in both lower and higher frequencies of the audio spectrum).
I agree that the published product info was very poor (tech specs for example). To buy it, it takes a leap of faith! It is not clear where to get the firmware updates nor how to do it.
Overall, the device works OK with the basics and does the job. Better would be to be able to play videos on it, or see other standard Ipod menus, such as song rating, enlarged album art. HK should instead allow direct video input from Ipod to the HK Screen, for the case of Ipod videos (that would be the logical way, right?) It seems that HK uses the ipod data port to download file tags and album art from the Ipod and re-creates an Ipod-like "Now playing" display on screen, but it takes 2-3 seconds to display album art (Ok, I guess). Since the data interface is slow, showing photo slideshow on the screen as screen saver, would be very, very slow. I imagine this approach of re-creating an Ipod display was used for working with non-Ipod USB Drives.
I agree screen saver is lame, no way to personalize it yet. Looking forward to this firmware enhancement. Displaying ipod photos is a good idea from another reviewer, for future.
When scrolling for a song on an ipod-like list (very cool), you can easily find the song you want by turning the controller wheel, but when you want to find the next one, the list does not continue where you left off, instead it starts scrolling from the first song on the list. You're better off skiping songs one by one, if you know the song is close by, else re-scroll list from top of list. This is a little frustrating when your list is huge.
I have not experienced song name changing, as the other reviewer reported, but your song library must be properly tagged for this to work well (as it does on the ipod itself). I obsess over proper file tagging and my library is pretty good. Day & night modes are manually selectable, and only with auto mode, the display changes with daylight prescence.
I agree that some song/album/artist titles don't fit, HK should make them scroll every 10 seconds or so.
Nice Product, Expensive.... As it shouldn't 2007-07-18
Well I got the Drive + Play 2 as a novelty I couldn't resist.
The product is pretty nice and impressive when properly intalled, but information available at the web or in the included manual isn't good as I expected.
Device works properly, have a fancy screen and a easy to drive control (I would like to have a shotage control).
Since I was about to order the device, I wondered how many songs could the USB feauture can handle, and I can't be able to get this information in the static webpage that I should expect to be more than a promo brochure. I tried to connect a hard disk with songs organized in folders (none in root directory), the screen showed loading like for 3 minutes until I got bored. I'll try later to put the info in the root directoy.
Sometimes the device change the name of the songs, something that I expect to be improved with a firmware update.
They're many options I would like to customize, like for example have a shortcut to change from day to night mode (white vs. black screen). I would like to change the sensitivity for this as I better like the night mode.
Probably this is more a nice to have wish list than a review. But I hope Harman Kardon launch a webpage to download new options, firmware updates, software tool to customize the device......
4 steps forward, 1 BIG step back 2007-07-09
I finally got my hands on the long-awaited Drive/Play2.
I've been using the Drive/Play 1 for almost a year and it worked good. There were a lot of short-comings, but in general it worked well.
The DP2 seemed to fix most of these shortcomings.
The things I like about the DP2 are:
The display on the DP2 is fantastic. It looks just like your ipod screen. Most song/artist/album titles fit in the screen space. Album art looks good.
The full rotation navigation wheel is a big improvement. There is a soft-click as it goes thru the menu items, so you can easily stop where you want.
When viewing albums and/or artists, you can quickly browse by letter, which if you have a large collection getting down to 'Pearl Jam' without the letter browsing was a pain. Now it's very simple.
It's got upgradeable firmware, which leads into it's
shortcomings:
There is a screensaver function, but only shows 5-10 harman promo slides. Hopefully they'll get this to where you can do a slide show from one of you ipod photo folders.
Even though the screen space is pretty large, some song/album/artist titles don't fit, it'd be great if they could scroll every 10 seconds or so.
It'd also be nice to be able to see the album art full screen and to rate songs just like on the ipod.
The last shortcoming is potentially the biggest. With the DP1, I used the wired FM modulator and didn't have any problems. With the DP2, using the included wired FM modulator, there is signal interference throughout the FM band. I ended up going with a add-on power FM modulator which seems to have done the trick. Bummer that I had to go to this step.
Overall, I'm very pleased with the product. The FM mod. issue brought it down to 4 stars.
