I got a new car stereo at the weekend, to replace my Dension DH102 which packed up in April. I was unable to get another DH102 or anything like it: players with their own hard disks seem to have gone totally out of fashion, and even Dension don't sell them any more. Instead, the new fashion is stereos which have an iPod connection; so I now have an Alpine CDE-9850Ri, and an iPod to plug into it. I haven't yet worked out whether I prefer this to the Dension.

Points in favour of the Alpine so far:

Works better in the cold. It's admittedly early days yet so I won't know how much better until the chills of February have come and gone; but the iPod/Alpine combination works fine now, which already makes it an improvement on the Dension, whose hard disk I'd have been taking indoors overnight to keep it warm at this time of year.

Hard disk is replaceable. The bit of the Dension which eventually packed up was its hard disk cartridge; I took the cartridge apart and found an ordinary laptop hard disk inside it, but it wasn't at all happy when I replaced it with a different disk. The Alpine's hard disk unit is an iPod, which should make it nice and easy to get a new one if and when I need to.

Plays other people's music. The Dension only played MP3s from its own hard disk, and radio. The Alpine also plays CDs, so if I have a passenger who doesn't like my music collection then they can bring some of their own. Or even their own iPod, if they have one.

Plenty of space. The Dension's disk was only 20Gb and was starting to feel rather cramped. I now have a 60Gb iPod plugged into the Alpine, and even if I do manage to fill it up (which is unlikely) I don't doubt that Apple will bring out even bigger ones as disk becomes cheaper.

On the other hand, points against the Alpine:

Not much display. The Dension had a huge pixelated display which contained lots of useful information and was significantly user-reconfigurable. The Alpine has about twelve seven-segment characters, which are normally used for a time display, so you have to actually press buttons if you want to know (for example) the name of the current track.

Menu navigation is rather slow. Apparently this model of stereo is set up to talk to the iPod natively at the full speed permitted by the interface, while many other ‘iPod-ready’ car stereo models have some hacky adapter in the way which slows things down. If that's true, they must be really slow; my Alpine is already uncomfortably clunky when scrolling through the iPod menus.

No queue function. One of the most obviously useful things about any music player with random access to a large music collection is that you can queue things up to be played in the future. In a car player this is particularly useful: instead of pressing lots of buttons to choose a new album when you're in the middle of driving (or alternatively going without music), you can queue up your next album when you're safely stopped. But the iPod doesn't support this, and therefore the Alpine doesn't either.

(Well, the iPod supports an ‘on-the-go playlist’ to which you can add albums and then ask it to play, but that takes three times as much button-pressing to set it up, and also requires holding down the select button, which is an iPod user-interface event that the Alpine apparently can't generate. I suppose for a long journey I could disconnect the iPod, set up an on-the-go playlist manually, then plug it back into the Alpine and ask it to play that playlist, but really, yuck.)

No latitude in menu setup. The iPod, and therefore the Alpine, does not permit me to organise my music into a hierarchy of subdirectories the way I want; it insists on doing it the way it wants. On the Dension I cunningly set up a two-level hierarchy which minimised the number of keypresses required to select any album; on the Alpine the best I can do is the two-level artist/album hierarchy, and that means scrolling through the rather long list of artists one by one.

Particularly bad about the last two points (in fact, quite possibly the last three) is that as far as I can tell they're fundamental limitations imposed by the iPod-based design, which means that no other stereo on the market will be able to fix them for me.

On the plus side, I suppose, that means I don't have to worry about whether I should have bought some other model instead. But it is rather annoying me that I can visualise exactly what my ideal car stereo would do, and none of its features seem obviously specialist to me, and yet nobody is prepared to sell me anything remotely like it. If I were more of a hardware person I might have given serious thought to building my own.