CarLinKit T-Box Plus CarPlay Android Box Review

hey guys wild o b XT here and today I am reviewing the Carling kit t-box plus uh this is a Android box that plugs into a car that has existing wired carplay and it essentially allows you to do wireless car play uh Wireless Android auto and of course um it runs Android so we'll get into a few things uh in all the details and some of the features and some of the pros and cons that I've found with this device I've had this device now for about two weeks so I'm gonna try to give you a really comprehensive review and I'm also going to tell you some of the things that are kind of specific to my car and the things that I suspect are kind of specific to my car and some of the things that are just uh definitely with the system so I'll I'll make sure I emphasize those particular things so the device itself is actually smaller than I thought it would be um this is what it is inside the palm of my hand it's actually a lot thinner than I thought um all the pictures on the internet make it look a lot bigger but in actuality it's uh it's pretty small it's pretty slim uh and if it's uh if you're so inclined to find a place hidden inside your center console or something like that to hide it it's not that hard to hide uh one other thing about the setup that I'm going to explain before I get into the review as you can see inside here hopefully uh you can see that there's two cards in here one of them is a Micro SD card I just have that in there for storage and the other one is a SIM card it does take a nano SIM so when you purchase this and the purchase link will be in the description below just make sure that you purchase it for the country that you're in I have a SIM card in here that I took from my cellular iPad Pro and I just stuck it in here for the purposes of testing this and so I can stream stuff while I am on the go all right so the first things I want to review is going to be startup time so we're going to take a look at how fast the t-box plus actually takes to start up the startup time is about 40 seconds from when carplay initializes from the actual head unit so here we go so as you can see here my system is booting up um so it now recognizes carplay and the t-box plus is now booting all right so that was about 40 seconds and the t-box is now up and running all right so I wanted to get into some of the features of this uh uh first of all I'm going to start with the Android stuff this is the main user interface you do have the option of having two separate user interfaces this is the one that I've tend to like but if you wanted to go into the second one you can go into settings here and then uh choose your different user interface by saying launcher style and change it to style one and style one is essentially a large music widget in the top left corner and then just your slew of apps afterwards okay um while driving I found this wasn't this wasn't the best uh uh when I am driving I do like to see both my um music and my map at the same time which is why I prefer launcher Style 2. launcher Style 2 has a giant map taking up the top half uh your whatever media you have playing is going to show the media information here and then you will have you can select three favorite apps here and then all apps is accessible here which kind of brings you back to like the launcher one user interface and you can um you can kind of configure this as as you wish which brings me into the second point is this is running Android so you can enter the Play Store and you can go and install all of your favorite things um I'm not sure I'm not an Android guy just to be up front I am an iPhone guy but I had an Android head unit in my old BRZ which I absolutely adored and I was hoping this would kind of bring the two experiences together I have found I'm not sure what kind of Android device um Google recognizes this as but I have found for example if I try to install Disney plus um Disney plus says that it's not compatible uh here it says app will not work with your device so um there are certain apps that you can't which I was kind of disappointed that Disney plus isn't on the list because um my kid loves Bluey and that's on Disney plus and unfortunately I can't but however uh I don't know if you caught it but if I go into all apps here I do have like Prime Video in here um and of course you have Google Chrome so I guess I could stream Disney plus that way obviously YouTube works on here so there's a bunch of streaming services that will work on here I uh no longer subscribe to Netflix since they jacked up the price but Netflix I can confirm does work on here if you are a Netflix subscriber um they also have something else called APK installer which does allow you to sideload a whole bunch of stuff I have not gotten into that thing uh however if you do ever need to sideload something a PK installer is here as well okay so let's get into on the pros of this device what are the main pros of this device is that number one the resolution is quite High and the pixel per inch the pixel density on the device is high which means when you open up a app like Maps you're going to see more of the map um text and things like that maybe a little smaller but you do have the full Google Experience here and that's a huge bonus um you'll be able to research stuff you'll be able to look at stuff obviously the largest advantage to this here is going to be running um Android so uh you'd be able to like I previously mentioned you can run the Google Play Store and you can find all sorts of stuff this thing obviously you run any Android app that you like as long as it is uh the App Store allows you to load it for example Waze also works on here ways Works beautifully on here all right so one thing I did mention was um pixel density and that's one huge advantage that the t-box plus has over a wired carplay obviously it does it wirelessly as well but one thing you'll notice for example here is because the pixel density is higher I can actually fit more apps into the home screen so I'll put a side by side um of the two interfaces but you'll notice that on the uh t-box side I can have five columns of apps whereas on the wired carplay side I can only have four Columns of apps that also spreads into everything else that is in here because um because the Tee Box does the rendering I can actually have a higher pixel density in almost everything so if I was to go into Maps I actually see more of the map than I would have on the wired side when I look at things like uh the search bar and things like that it doesn't take up as much as the screen and the text is a little finer so I can actually see more results so if I look for restaurants in my area okay I can actually see more results here because the text is actually smaller and can squeeze more stuff in if I go into the music app okay uh I actually see more in the music app than I do uh on wired carplay I see more album covers in the list here I can see a longer list okay uh when you go into browse same thing you see a longer list here okay um and then of course if you go into messages it's going to be the exact same thing you're going to see more of your messages all compressed in um when you're actually it doesn't make a huge difference when you're in the now playing screen so I'm just gonna uh just start up some music here I guess it really doesn't matter what I'm listening to I'm just going to keep the volume down anyway okay um the screen here doesn't make a huge difference you still have all the same uh user interface that you would have before okay but obviously when you pull up the playing next stuff um everything's going to be more compressed so that to me is a huge advantage of this um you can see more of everything you do more of everything and uh your carplay experience is actually a little bit better for that reason there's also no perceivable difference in sound quality and I'm going to put a huge asterisk on that um and I'll get to why I'm adding that asterisk later okay but there's no perceivable difference in sound quality if you load anything onto the the micro SD card or uh or use use a streaming service like Spotify or apple music it's going to do a really great job in blasting that music out and um if you are this is going to be vehicle specific okay so this is specific to my Subaru Outback um Android auto users in up until 2020 so up to end including the 2022 model year uh Wireless Android auto is not available on uh on the head unit and neither is full screen Android auto and this solves both of those problems you can have wireless Android auto running on the t-box plus and it will show as full screen because the car thinks it's using carplay to display everything so those are huge advantages um and the main like I said the main advantages here is the fact that you can run Android apps so you could play games on here it does uh detect touch but it's not multi-touch so for example if I was in the maps app here and I wanted to scroll around that's fine but if I wanted to zoom in it won't let me zoom in so it only detects a single touch so that kind of sucks but that's not something that's like a deal breaker when you search you know use you have your typical Android keyboard since this is running Android you can swap this keyboard out with anything fancy uh for me I'm just simply uh just simply running gboard okay but obviously you can sign into all your Google services and have everything sync over all right so there's a lot of advantages to having the system like this but unfortunately there are a few disadvantages and I'm going to go through them uh I feel that's in order of um least problematic to most problematic um so the first one is I'm not sure if it's just uh an apple music thing or whatever but if I launch Apple music I think nine times out of ten I am asked to launch it I have to sign in and for some odd reason um I'm not sure again I'm not sure if it's the Apple music app um I'm not sure if it's the Apple music app on this specific device but for whatever reason it just doesn't doesn't remember my sign in and I gotta type in my password every single time and that's super super annoying because I'm one of those people that use a password generator and my my passwords a whole bunch of letters numbers and gobbledygoop and for me to needing to type that in every single nearly every single time I come in that's a huge hassle so um I'm not a Spotify user so I haven't tested this with Spotify but if this is amongst a lot of third-party apps that it's having troubles keeping you signing in that's an issue um the second thing is kind of related to the pixel density that I uh mentioned earlier and you'll notice this when you're using carplay you'll notice this when you are just looking at text like even in the maps app is that the text is not crisp and um and this is definitely to do with the higher pixel density and it possibly has to do with the screen that it's projecting on but the text itself is is not as sharp now is it unreadable absolutely not you can see here the text is definitely readable it's it works for whatever you need to do it's just not as crisp as native Apple carplay okay so the third one is this home screen I kind of wish you can customize it a little bit more um you're kind of stuck with this three three section look or if you decide to use style one that look where you have uh the widget in the corner and then the rest of your apps here besides that you don't really have any customization options uh when I had the Android head unit inside my brzed uh it was it was basically an Android tablet so I could rearrange applications I could have widgets I could have all sorts of stuff I can make that um home screen exactly the way I wanted it to look here you're kind of stuck with those two options you can customize what's up top here so if you're going back into the settings you can choose what is taking over that top half there you'll see that you can have YouTube there you can have uh basically any application that you have installed I have it set to maps you can have it set to whatever mapping application you want in there Waze is an option for some odd reason you can have the keyboard up there uh you can even have carplay up there but the main thing is that I just kind of wish you had more play with regards to the home screen here um I did mention at the beginning of the video that this takes about 40 seconds for it to fully boot up um and even then maybe add another five to ten seconds because even after the initial screen shows up it still lags it a little bit as it does some background work um so that's that takes a little longer um when I have a wired carplay setup in this car I can literally plug in my phone in in about 10 seconds the entire carplay setup is ready to go here not only does it have to load the Android side of it which takes that 40 odd seconds but then when you launch carplay you have another uh another waiting time for your carplay to show up so once it's actually up and running though it's not bad it's not laggy it's nothing of the sort okay you have your dashboard view um you have your your regular app icon View and that leads me into this third part and this is we're starting to get into deal breaker or territory in my opinion um the first thing is in wired car plate inside the Outback so I'm going to be really specific here because every car could be different but even if I was in my own user interface inside of the actual car if I were to get a text message carplay will take over and show me the carplay interface with a message showing uh with the banner message down here at the bottom with this unit it does not do that it doesn't do that um whether or not you're in the Android interface which is here or if you are in the cars interface if I get a text message it does not notify me that I have a text message so here in here comes the problem is that if you are buying this as an Android box you have them using Google Maps you're using um uh Spotify or whatever streaming service you're using and you get a text message well whether or not Auto Link is running and whether or not your phone is currently actively connected to this you won't get notified that you got that text message so um that could be a blessing and a curse Some people prefer like I don't want to text and drive even using Siri or even using the Google assistant or whatever okay but it won't interrupt whatever you're doing if Auto link is not at the Forefront obviously if it's at the Forefront you're going to have your notification you're going to have your banner show up earlier in the video you saw that I might I had a group message going between my family and uh that Banner was there okay but that Banner only shows up if you're in the actual carplay interface which for me kind of sucks because uh the main way I communicate with people is generally through text message or iMessage and um using Siri to do that I've gotten pretty good at that and the fact that that doesn't happen unless I'm in this user interface kind of is a drawback for me okay so the last couple points I want to make um for me they are definitely in deal breaker territory however I will also mention that this is very very car specific so what I'm experiencing in these last two points may or may not happen in a different car but if you drive a 6th gen Subaru Outback I'm pretty sure you're gonna have the same things as me if you don't drive a Sixth Gen Subaru Outback then this may not apply to you so the first thing is going to be communication between What flows through the USB uh and what the Tee Box actually recognizes so there's a few things here um the first one that I notice is headlights so if I turn my headlights on all it does is is dim the screen but that's the car doing that you'll notice that Google Maps for example is still in full like daylight mode in in White and the only time I can get this to uh switch over into like quote unquote dark mode is by manually going in and it's going to be linked to uh sometimes it works with the sunset and sunrise okay so here theme I can see you can see that it's always in light theme always in dark or same as device I don't really have that whole uh that whole um sunset sunrise you do have sort of the appearance settings here under display uh dark Me theme will only turn on automatically at Sunset okay if you turn that on uh it will kind of do it and then your Google Maps though for some reason is still in in kind of dark mode here so this this to me is is kind of an annoyance um however I will say in car play it does recognize um uh daylight and and night mode like instantly it does work so that's that's okay um the second thing I'm going to say is that if you are in even if you are in carplay mode and you are listening to music like I am here my Subaru Outback for some odd reason does not recognize any media being played by this Tee Box so you'll notice where it says uh Apple carplay up top I usually will get a artist and uh the song name here or the album name and that is blank and it doesn't matter whether I'm listening to music in Wireless carplay mode it doesn't matter if I'm watching YouTube videos it doesn't matter uh whether I'm listening to the native Apple music app when it lets me sign in okay um all in all it just simply doesn't communicate well with the car so whether whether I'm uh no matter what music I'm listening to it doesn't the in-car entertainment doesn't recognize that anything's being played okay so again this last one is definitely car specific but it is a deal breaker for me so um I'm gonna mention it just in case it happens to other people in other cars but here's here we go currently I am playing music in the native Apple music app on Android okay I'm not doing it through carplay and in the maps application I I am navigating to in this case I'm going to the closest Panera Bread no big deal here's the problem is my car whenever the navigation app and I use the word navigation app it's not just Google Maps it happens on Waze as well whenever there needs to be spoken directions or the potential of spoken directions while playing music and the map application or the navigation application is on the screen somewhere my card defaults to using the voice activation Channel for the car so let me explain here I am inside the music app you'll notice at the top here it says apple carplay and if I raise the volume there's a music note indicating that it's playing audio and the sound is actually good okay if I switch to the maps app now you'll notice now it says no audio playing and I have when I tried to change the volume it uses the dictation voice activation problem now here's the problem now that I crank the volume I'm not sure if the microphone can pick it up but the sound quality is absolutely horrendous and that's because in my car the voice activation system uses mono audio it doesn't use stereo and it's like a super low bit rate so if you ever want to listen to music while navigating in my car I'm stuck listening to crappy audio the only workaround I've found for this is to use wireless carplay to play my audio because if I use Wireless carplay to play the audio so now I've just switched from the native uh native Apple music app to Apple music via Wireless carplay and then I go and I leave this right I can navigate using Apple maps without an issue it still says Apple carplay I still get my music note and I'm still getting good audio if I decide to go back to the car now and open Google Maps again even while I'm playing music through Apple through the music here okay I still get that really crappy audio with Google maps showing on the screen and that annoys the hell out of me I've upgraded the audio in my car because I love listening to my music loud I like clarity and this just drives me absolutely Bonkers I cannot get my head around this so in my case then I would love to use Google Maps um I'm an apple music subscriber this is definitely an issue with navigation apps and how the Tee Box handles audio but this to me is a deal breaker um I I almost this is now a very nice Wireless car play uh device for me it is I don't know if you heard that sound difference but that sound difference was instantly noticeable but for me um in this specific car I this to me is just a wireless carplay adapter now because I can't have high quality audio while I'm driving so overall um if you look at just the Tee Box itself I would say this is a solid 8 out of 10 product it takes a little bit long to boot but um the fact that you can load almost any Android app on here and have it in your car's infotainment system that's just awesome um it seems to be Fairly reliable if you factor in all of my specific issues that I'm having um it drops the score to about a six out of ten I hate having to constantly need to sign into Apple music the audio routing issue for me is a deal breaker I can't stand that at all I've upgraded the audio in my Outback and I can't stand just listening to Mono music while navigating so um for me if I keep using this t-box plus it's going to be exclusively just with wireless carplay um other than that it's a great box I love the fact that you can you can have a SIM card in there and you can stream um obviously if you're going to stream YouTube and things like that please only do that while parked and in a safe location do not do that at all while driving that is probably illegal in many many areas including where I am in Ontario okay so that's my review of the t-box Plus uh if you guys want to purchase it you can save 18 uh using the code wild at the in the description I'll leave a link there where you can purchase it and I hope you guys enjoy this sorry it took so long um as some of you may know if you follow me on Instagram my Outback was in kind of a rear end and that kind of delayed uh that kind of delayed my whole thing I wanted to get this video out before my car went into the body shop to get the the whole the rear bumper fixed anyways drive safe everyone again if you want to purchase this you can save 18 by using the code wild and I'll leave the code and the link to the product in the description have a great night

Channel: wildxtrek

Views: 14,061

Keywords: Subaru, Outback, Android, CarPlay, Android Auto, Wireless, CarLinKit

Id: EW27STSohq8

Length: 30min 37sec (1837 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023