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Ever seen those car stereo upgrade kits?

5/25/2024

I installed one of those today. For some reason. Acutally many. The 2007 Corolla is a magnificent car. The 2007 Corolla is also a very boring car. Mine had a few media oriented problems, and no easy solutions. For starters, the CD player was broken. When I got it originally my plan was to just burn my favorite music onto a series of CD-Rs that I have lying around (for my Dreamcast) so I could have music on the car. That's fine though, I can just listen to the radio right? WRONG. Unfortunately I happen to live in Puerto Rico, an island with a uniquely refined and flavorful taste of music among the aging demographic, but anyone 55 below seems to have the worst music taste known to man. It brings me shame bveing from the same place where reggaeton was invented. Puerto Rico has contributed many wonderful things to the world like Piña Colada, the Bomba and Plena music Genres, a unique style of Salsa music, and our many MANY fried foods and other dishes. Reggaeton does not belong on that list. It is the single most unimaginative repetitive and uncreative garbage. All of this to say, 78% of all local FM stations are reggaeton, which I hate with a burning passion. The other 22% are either classical music or "old music". AM is even worse cause its all just politics talk shows. That's fine though, can't use CDs, can't use the radio, SURELY the headpone jack works right? Hahaha... HAHAHAHAAHAA!!! IT DOESNT EVEN HAVE ONE!!!!!!!

Being out of options, I begrudgingly went to my local best buy and bought one of those tiny Bluetooth to FM thingies. I had to buy a dongle for my car. ANyways, It was nice being able to like... listen to music on my travels. It's not without a downside tho. Whenever I get a call and I answer it takes over, and the mic on the damn thing basically doesnt work, so I'd have to fiddle around with my phone and swap it to speaker which is barely audible because the cabin on this car is rather loud. Fast forward 2 years and I hate my phone cause it has touch issues and Ive been having to answer calls in the car annoyingly for so long. I got desperate and ordered one of those "smart radios" on amazon. This one to be precise.

I always thought these kinds of mods were kinda stupid, but at this point it was seeming like replacing the radio was the only option, and if I'm gonna do it might as well modernize the car and not just buy some other dinky radio system. I'm so glad I did. I spent the evening installing it and it was rather easy too. But MY GOSH is this such a quality of life improvement! Being able to pick up and make calls, with microphone audio that doesnt suck to boot! All while keeping the map up as well. It's truly convenient. It's not without its weird oddities though. At the time of writing, the latest android version is android 14. This.. THING is running android 13. This is what spending money gets you??? Good hardware??? This damn thing is smooth, at least on the android interface. It seems to have all the google services blocked and wifi automatically turns off after a bit. I have decided to not fuck with it™️. I can sideload apps and files tho, I might try to put a GBA emulator or something like that and report back with a new post about it. Aside from that, the experience seems to be fine, as per usual it would be smart to avoid the stock OS like the plague and use Android Auto or Apple Car Play.

The way this thing does its integration with AndroidAuto and AppleCarplay is a bit weird. Since the radio is technically an android tablet it OBVIOUSLY doesnt run neither of these frontends. It uses an app called zlink or something, never heard of it before. After surfing the web for a bit, it seems that all these super china radios use it to enable android and iphone frontends and from what I can tell, it's legit. I can't fine a SINGLE developer page or any information behind the company that develops the software, but people seem to happily share their zlink APKs online. I won't question it. As long as I can continue to pick up calls and keep the map up on my car's dash, I won't complain. Hella sketchy tho, but if it works it works!