Time for an update!
The hardware has been flawless so far but I struggled for a long time to get the aux input sorted and finally gave up. The packaging/advertising for this head unit was very deceiving and shame on me for not doing more research.

Contrary to what the packaging implies it does not come with an aux input out of the box, rather according to the manual and Alpine Tech support you must use an adapter that plugs into your bluetooth....so kiss your bluetooth unit (that you also have to purchase separately by the way) goodbye ....oh wait the cable was discontinued before the unit was ever on sale.....so next option was some other random adapter that plugs into some other port....nope also discontinued prior to the head units release.....It took a lot of digging on forums, phone calls, and searching for the correct cables to no avail...

Long story short I've been listening to music via my external harddrive for some time (ripping podcasts/streams to mp3) ugh what a pain

I happened across the Alpine website earlier today looking for a new unit and saw that they were now advertising Iphone compatibility??? hmmm? So next I searched a plethora of forums only to discover all the issues users have encountered with ios updates noting the compatibility was broken during ios 4.x versions...so I tried it anyway and to my surprise it synced the first time!

Finally got the streaming audio/podcast/news that I set out to get during the build (over a year later!)
I wish I would have ditched the Storm II sooner!

Oh I also never did find the appropriate antenna adapter, but just as well, I can't stand local broadcast radio. (I must have tried 3 or 4 different ones that were listed for use with the xf)

One last bit, I'm still planning on taking some of the advice from previous threads and building a new non-ported box, when I built the current one I went a little thin on the mdf