Started looking at these devices a year ago for my 2020 Prime Limited but was turned off by the price and confusion on the variety of models. Goal is to watch videos on my lunch break parked so I can mess around on my phone instead of using my phone for watching. Did not want to get a tablet to just watch videos. Obtained a heavily used iPhone 6 and jail broke it. This let me enable add apps that played video. Ran like garbage due to the age of the phone and only VLC player would work out of the adds I forced. Google Maps and Spotify worked great. Screen finally died and started using an free iPhone SE but was too new to jailbreak so was only music and maps. Side note, found out this button on the radio pauses live radio like a DVR. Coworker and I were talking about this again, adding something to his 2014 Q50. He ended up buying an Android full screen with factory physical A/C buttons on it, designed for his car $1,100. It had pigtails that tied into the factory harness and integrates pretty well, including showing RPM and TPMS. Now I wanted my screen to do cool stuff. Here are the 4 I played with... You should expect all of them fail to boot, disconnect, crash, or just stop at random. Can fail with when starting the car, opening too many things at once, enabling or changing too many settings in one sitting, or just because it feels like. Goes back to factory system with either "USB error" or "Appleplay Disconnected". Might reconnect on it's own or sometimes you can get it going again by unplugging and plugging back in. Nothing would happen when connecting my iPhone after some errors. In many cases you have to restart the car because that USB port gets disabled by the car. Read this can happen in general with any device connected but seems worse on these Android car boxes. From another PriusChat post, I tried a cheap one from Aliexpress (with blue cover on still). Android 10, slow moving through the system, video was jumpy, and did not have Android Auto but could enable Developer mode which let me remote to system for messing with. Next is Binize. Excellent and fast customer support for my random questions. Booted fast, played videos great on Android 10. Connected to Android Auto fine for a little then the system would crash until I turned off auto connect for it. Adding a SIM card seemed to make this device crash more also. Carlinkit worked just a well as Binize but had Android 9 which I'd rather have newer for the price. Biggest reason for trying this one was it's claims for steering wheel control. All devices allow for volume control but so far none have been able to skip a song. Asked them about going to Android 11 and they said to be careful of others that claim to be on 11 aka false advertisers out there. Lastly is the KSPIV which has the guts of the CUSP but at a lower price. Fastest unit out of them all, running on Android 11, smooth video and HAS FULL steering wheel controls. Can skip songs and skip ahead in video along with volume. Been running fine off a SIM car or hotspot. Wish list would be the ability to add widgets, awaiting reply from support. Split screen is a nice feature on these devices also.
Explain to me. For the 2017 Prime Limited model, will these devices last? I don't have built-in Carplay/Android Auto.
I picked up the binize this winter and although the firmware update process is a little annoying (gotta download a zip file from their site, unzip it and move yet another zip file into a microSD card that's formatted to fat32) the latest update has fixed most of my pain points. Audio is better. It doesn't seem to crash, although android auto does a weird crash then start again thing. It's quick and continues your route if your were in one. I only wish it would start Android auto right off the bat instead of going into it's android 10 home screen. But yeah, it's been great having wireless Android auto on my XLE. Unfortunately you need at least wired carplay for any of these to work. The pre-carplay model years won't work, sorry.
