Okay i dont know if this has been beat to death...but the SL2i is nearly double in price vs the GROM where the GROM has a option for a USB stick...which i prefer even tho i have an ipod

 

what's your question?.. which one is better?

 

sorry - yes...and what the advantage of the SL2i up is seeing how its double the price

 

grom units were know to lock up and be finicky on occasion. This may have been addressed in recent firmware. I've had SL2i-UP installed for about 18 months and it's never failed to work as expected.

 

The Vaistech is mostly for Apple products and the Grom is really for those who don't have anything Apple, so in other words the Vaistech is better because its made with our car in mind and works excellent and keeps everthing OEM.

 

I know you didn't refer to this, but the Grom doesn't have an option for Video. The Vaistech does (not in the model mentioned). For us owners with Non-ML units, this would definitely be another reason to go with Vaistech.

 

I chose GROM for my car because I can't stand Apple products or the proprietary nonsense that gets forced on you to use them (and because it's cheap). I appreciate the flexibility and cost effectiveness of being able to attach any USB mass storage device. You can have many different large and cheap USB flash sticks in the car, you can change the contents with any PC, anywhere just by dragging and dropping as you would with any storage device, and though I've not tried it technically you could easily pop in an entire 1TB mobile drive costing less than a hundred with every piece of music known to man on it. Try that with an iPod. You're also guaranteed that in a couple of years time, USB drives will still be USB drives and work whereas the apple du jour may or may not still be compatible forcing you into another expensive upgrade.

That being said, the downside with GROM is that their customer support is severely lacking (you get what you pay for, right...) and they are very slow and reluctant to react to customer concerns. My GROM used to lock up quite frequently during startup, but with recent firmware updates that has ceased (thank goodness). The only remaining problem I have with the unit is that sometimes (fairly rarely now) during startup, it seems to forget what input to be on (I only use USB) and I need to do the input selection key dance to get it going which involves pressing FM, then CD, then track up or down.

 

I own both units. No doubt Vaistech is the way to go. More features and much better quality.