As this is a not-so-cheap device, please understand that I’m giving absolute, brutal honesty here, nitpicking as much as possible. I don’t want this review to come off as it being negative… overall, it’s REALLY good, better than both the touchscreen and non-touchscreen OEM head units. If I could, I’d rate it 4.7 stars. It’s not absolutely perfect, but none of the negatives are bad enough that I would hold back a strong recommendation. This is a HUGE upgrade over both of the OEM head units (touchscreen or non-touchscreen).=== The Good ===The look alone is stellar, as good or better than OEM. It looks VERY clean. It’s not like you just swapped out a double-din head unit that’s randomly sticking out of your dash. It’s a LOT cleaner. This is one of the most important aspects of these, as aftermarket head units often look goofy in a dash.When I got my car years ago, a colleague already had one and it was very clear that the OEM in-dash computer was terrible. Car companies are not software companies, and maybe it was expecting too much of car companies to not make terrible software. So back then, I intentionally did not get the touchscreen dash unit. Android auto was already better at the time, but still not great, and not yet available on these makes. We recently had a rental car though, and android auto has improved a lot. Overall, the experience today in android auto is astronomically better than anything else out there. Let the software companies write software. They just do it better.Just one of the examples on why the android auto UX is so good nowadays… if you have your home set in Google maps, and you’re not near home, it regularly shows you the “home” button as a suggested destination when you have no destination set. While it’s not like I need directions to get home, but knowing the traffic is extremely useful. I almost always pull up traffic for where I’m going, even when I know a dozen ways to get there, specifically because traffic can be so bad. And when I say it shows, I mean it’s just in the corner before you even hit search. The button pops it up at the right time, hides away at the right time. It just works so well. It also shows some other destination suggestions… don’t know whether it’s pulling from my calendar, or recent destinations, or my common destinations. Regardless, it just works.If you want another sign of how good android auto is, over the last decade, tons of car manufacturers have ditched their own OEM software, and instead just run android auto on the OEM head unit. It really is no contest. Now you can have that too cleanly in your late model ride.There’s an installation video for this head unit line on youtube, search up CGOGC (the brand name for the device) to find it. They do an install in that video in an old imprezza (only thing different is the dash shell), but then also a walkthrough of the software so you can get an idea. It’s a LOT longer than any review video you might find here, so search it up. Only downside is that some of the screens are in Mandarin in that video. The head unit when you receive it defaults to English.Once you have the hardware installed, there’s a section in the settings to map your steering wheel controls. You click the function button on the head unit, and then tap the button on the steering wheel that matches to save. It’s under “SWC” in settings. Everything mapped up nicely and it works great.Voice assistant is great but not so 100% seamless that it’s magical. Just play around with it to learn the quirks, and then it’s pretty good. Like instead of just saying “send a message to saying “, you have to say something like “send a message on whatsapp to “. Then it’ll ask you the message. Or “send a message by SMS to ” and then wait for it to acknowledge, and then you can say your message and tap send. When a text comes in, you can have it read the message out loud. If a person has more than one number on that contact, there are even more quirks (e.g. have to say “mobile” or “office”). Again, not amazing, but way better than flipping through texts while driving.=== The Mediocre ===Installation wasn’t completely easy mode but wasn’t too bad. I am not experienced in dash installs. Last time I did one was literally decades ago back in high school, and I only did a few with friends back then. This package included all parts, don’t need an additional wiring harness. Don’t need to cut any wires. There’s also a plastic pry-bar for removing pieces of your dash, but I found myself occasionally using one of my metal pry bars. There are likely videos on youtube on how to disassemble your dash (so many different makes/models/years), not specifically from this seller, and I’d strongly recommend reviewing them for your specific car. Other than the YT videos, I had no assistance, and it took me about two hours, start to finish, from opening the box to walking away from the garage. That includes both the hardware install, plus playing around with the software for post install setup. And a large portion was just playing around with the software, probably an hour. The hardware instructions included here could be better though. At one point I just said “hmm, I think I got everything, maybe? I’ll just try it.” And when I turned the car on, it worked. Other than RCA cables (if you have an upgraded speaker/amp system), I don’t think there’s any you can really mess up, plugging something into the wrong spot… just check the pin counts on each plug and match them up.The hardware isn’t slow, but it’s not 100% as fast as flagship phones. You probably won’t ever notice if you’re only using auto with maps spotify. But if you do anything outside the normal everyday car features, like even opening the Google Play Store, there is noticeable slowdown.Android auto has a pretty good experience nowadays, but carplay for my wife’s iPhone might put off some Apple users. I We have a bunch of stuff from Google and Apple, but even with our iPad, I use Google maps. Apple maps on her phone did not want to connect with the head unit for navigation. Either iPhone users must use Google maps, or figure out something I didn’t figure out. Google maps iPhone does connect fine though, and a lot of Apple users prefer Google maps over Apple maps.There is a media player that does video, even an AV input, so you can technically watch video, but I’m not sure why you’d want to. You should be driving, not watching a movie.It does have two USB-A female ports that you can run into your glove box, connect up phones and other multimedia devices. I didn’t test this though as we just use bluetooth, so I can’t say whether that’s good or bad.When you start your car, the upper OEM dash screen may say “Check audio system” every time you start your car. You can remove the negative terminal cable on your car battery and reconnect it to get rid of this notification. I got this, a bunch of people have reported it when changing head units in this kind of car, and the fix worked.I did not wire up the reverse camera. The OEM camera still works fine on the upper screen, and although this screen is a lot bigger, pulling off all the paneling to get the reverse camera wire back there, and figuring out how/where to mount it externally all seems like a crazy amount of work for such little benefit.The listing says there’s an external mic, but my kit didn’t have one. There’s a mic hole in the front of the receiver anyways. I wasn’t so sure about wiring up the external mic all around the drivers side console and A pillar anyways. The audio quality during calls is pretty average for speakerphone in a car.It’s important to understand the difference of when something is playing on the head unit vs something on your phone while connected via auto. Remember… the head unit is literally an android tablet mashed into the dashboard of your car. You can do many things directly on the head unit without your phone at all. For example, if your wifi reaches your garage, or you turn your phone into a hotspot for your car, you can download your playlists on Spotify and play directly from the head unit without a phone connected. But it’s not 100% seamless because you still need an internet connection. Any time someone else is driving your car without you in it… it’s a question of what still works without being connected to a phone. The radio and Spotify still work great. Maps… well, more on that below. You’re not going to do this very often, but it’s something to keep in mind.=== The Nitpicks ===Now for the nitpicks… I say nitpicks rather than “the bad” or “the cons” because I believe all of these are either really small and not outweighed by the major pluses here, or they just don’t matter to most people in most cases.There are two settings apps, one seemingly a modified android settings app, and the other for head unit settings. If they must be separate, these should be better labeled to something that actually makes sense. And the split of which settings are in which settings app should be cleaned up. Whatever you’re looking for, you may just have to wander around aimlessly in both. Modern android allows you to search directly in settings for something, and this functionality has been disabled in both settings apps.They modded some of the default UI from android for connecting your phone via bluetooth, and it’s not in either of the settings apps. You also can’t long-press the bluetooth icon from the top drawer anymore. Bluetooth connections are a totally separate bluetooth icon and you’re going to have to flip through some apps to find it.Downloading offline maps with Google Maps directly to the device doesn’t work at all. Google maps just says in the offline maps section that it won’t connect to Google servers to download after you pick your area. (a) Wifi is connected at full and Google maps is loading fine. (b) I even tried a different wifi. (c) I verified that the Google Maps version is the Play Store latest, not some old AOSP apk that’s outdated or has potentially been modified. (d) I tried setting it to “download on wifi or mobile network” and that did nothing. (e) I even tried downloading a tiny town nearby so the data package would be as small as possible. Nope. (f) Product forums suggest clearing app data, and that didn’t work either. It just doesn’t work. This is not a huge problem, as you’re usually only going to be connecting through auto, rather than using maps directly on the device. But if someone else is driving your car, they either have to (1) use their phone unconnected, or (2) connect their phone over bluetooth to use auto. They can’t just use offline maps on the head unit alone. I have not found a workaround for this, other than using a different map app on the head unit specifically for offline maps. This is doubly weird because Spotify directly on the head unit had no problem downloading my library.There’s a GPS receiver that you can install, but it’s pointless. Either you have your phone connected with auto, so it’s using your phone’s GPS, or the lack of head unit connectivity mean you have no maps. In both cases, the GPS receiver is irrelevant. Not really a negative, just why?Now comes the biggest nitpick. If it applies to your intended use case, then android auto is not for you. I say android auto, because this quirk isn’t unique to this device… it applies to all android auto. Android auto specifically has a weird quirk with how it handles wifi — again not unique to this head unit, applies to all android auto connecting via wireless. You might THINK that auto is using BT like your traditional head unit, but nope… it’s using BT for proximity, and then that triggers the head unit to become a wifi hotspot that your phone connects to. This is apparently because latency and bandwidth on BT is terrible and wifi is so much faster, giving you much better sound quality. Google is supposedly working on a “client mode” that switches it the other way, so your phone acts as the server. But until then, you’re out of luck (and even if they do deliver, there’s no guarantee that this head unit or your phone will get the upgrade). The alternatives: (a) don’t use wireless, use a wire instead. No thanks. (b) don’t use android auto, just use the regular BT connection instead. Yes, even with auto disabled, you can still go into BT audio and play media and make calls like it’s a regular bluetooth connection. Not a huge fan, would still use auto. So why does it matter?(1) If you use spotify/pandora/iheart on your phone, you probably don’t care. But if your wifi reaches your garage and you want to download anything to the head unit over wifi, you have to turn your phone’s bluetooth off so they don’t auto-connect. If you’re looking to load your own mp3s onto the device and have a background sync app passively keep it sync’d up, or use spotify/pandora/iheart directly on the head unit regularly, then this is just infuriating. It’s extra manual steps any time you want to add music, so you CANNOT just passively do these. _IF_ that’s what you’re going for, android auto is such a bad experience, you’re just realistically never going to use it that way. This quirk of android auto is by far the worst part here, and would be your main reservation against this, but it’s not unique to this head unit — it applies to all android auto devices, and not many people are looking to do this. If you are though, you’re out of luck.(2) Where else might that quirk impact your experience? There’s no sim or esim option, so you won’t be able to have laptops, tablets, or other stuff hotspot off this head unit. Even if you can get another sim/esim from your carrier, there’s nothing in the interface to even set it up, and I didn’t see any sim card ports anywhere. The instruction manual says no sim/esim. If you pull up “SIM Cards” in settings, everything is greyed out. I doubt the hardware radio is even there for 4G/5G. So if you were hoping to hotspot from this to your kid’s iPad, you’re out of luck. And because of the wifi hotspot quirk in auto, if you were using your phone as a hotspot for your kids or other devices, that definitely won’t work while auto is connected. Again, not unique to this head unit, applies to all android auto devices, doesn’t impact most users, and Google is supposedly working on a fix.It does NOT have a CD player. If you were hoping to use CDs in 2025, look elsewhere. But if you’re like 99.999% of people, this is not an issue for you. Similarly, it doesn’t have a cassette player, betamax, astrolabe, or landing pad for carrier pigeons. I mention them because surely those are equally important features for people who need a car CD player in 2025. (The humor here should show you how nitpicking I’m being here).Now I know I’m crazy nitpicking in this section, which is why I didn’t take off a star. I just figured more disclosure is better. Overall, this is a HUGE upgrade, totally worth.
