I have the Alpine, thats why I thought it would have worked out the box. I put in the anniversary wheel, the cruise worked fine still.
I have been drooling over head units for a few days now and I have narrowed my choice a bit. There is this one from Gilbertd:-
and a newer one:-
There is a bewildering number of Kenwood head units. I have been on the Kenwood site and compared specs of the two above.
Comments before I hand over the dosh?
Looking at the spec on the 7000 it is slightly different to mine. It has the extra buttons along the bottom which I assume are to select stored stations which is easier than on mine where you have to press a button which brings up a list on the display, you then scroll down the list with the volume knob and press it to select the station. It also has 31 levels of dimming whereas mine only has 3, bright, dimmed 1 and dimmed 2. However, it seems that these are selected manually or timed but mine has a feed from the panel lights so it dims automatically when you put the lights on. My only complaint with that is that you can't set the dimming level in auto, it defaults to dimmed 1 while I would prefer it to dim to dimmed 2 as I like to have everything dimmed right down when I'm driving on deserted, unlit, French roads in the middle of the night. The biggest downside to the 7000 is that it only has a 1.5 line display compared with the 3 line display on mine. The Kenwood 1.5 line display looks a bit pixelly to me which is why I bought the one I did rather than save a few quid and get the BT49DAB. Other than that, the technical spec looks to be the same so it's likely to be down to which one you prefer the appearance of.
The rear USB is useful though. It comes out on a flying lead and I've run it under the centre console so it comes out just in front of the passenger seat. As well as using it for an iPod, MP3 player or USB stick, it can supply 1A so is useful for charging your phone.
One thing to be aware of when using the bluetooth features are they vary depending on what phone you have. Before I bought mine I used a stand alone Bluetooth handsfree thing that would beep at me when I got a text message and give me the option of having the unit read it aloud (with interesting pronunciations of text shorthand) or ignore it. The Kenwood doesn't support this with my particular phone, so all that happens when I get a text message is it vibrates making it easy to miss them. Voice calling is the same, it only works with certain phone models. Calling and receiving calls works fine though and the phonebook in the phone is copied to the stereo so you can call from call history or the phonebook from the stereo front panel.