[Android Head-Units] djblaze852002:
USB Debugging, USB ODBII, Google Now, Speech/Voice, Etc...

I'm very pleased you found the password to the USB Debugging! I accidentally unchecked it in the settings one day. You cannot turn it back on without the password. I was afraid I would have to go through the entire root process again (really not that big of a deal). I haven't tried the password yet but I will later tonight!

USB OBDII

Today I also recieved my USB OBD II from ebay http://www.ebay.com/itm/300905911932 and wanted to test it. I plugged in the OBD II reader, then used the USB adapter to plug it in via the front mini USB. It was recognized by the unit and even asked if it wanted Torque to open up by default. I opened torque and changed the settings to use USB OBDII and it did not get any readings from my car. It cannot seem to find the adapter. It could be that I got a bad cheap adapter, however i did use the link from another user who got his to work. Before going through the trouble of returning it or just getting another one, does anyone have any suggestions as to what could be going wrong? Is using the front usb not correct? (the unit does recognize the usb device), Is there a setting in torque other than USB that I am missing? Any other ideas? I am using a copy of torque 1.8 that I found. The free version of torque doest seem to have a USB setting (only bluetooth and wifi) I want to buy the app as soon as I am sure it works. I dont want to waste my money or my one-time refund should it not work.

Google Now

I really want to get google now working better. In fact in my opinion that should be one of the top priorities. If google now would work as well as it does on a phone, there would be so much less I would need to do using buttons (or screen presses) at all! There are ways to make it always listening, there are ways to implement tasker... I spoke with another user who posted directions on how he got google now to sort of work HERE. However I was able to achieve the same functionality i think, just by installing novalauncher. When I press the microphone on the desktop, I am able to speak commands like play songs byXXX, Navigate to XXX address, and obviously basic search functionality. Sometimes it messes up and seems to have difficulty listening.

Some of what it doesnt do:

"Play song by XXX" - It will show a card with the artists and a pulldown for which music app I want to listen with, but it cannot launch the app automatically (when the progress bar finishes). I have to press open in play music or open in spotify.... minor annoyance

"What is the weather" - It will show the basic google search result, but it will not speak anything back to me.

Offline Navigation

Some people's units came with Sygic installed. I think I deleted it when doing a clean install once (I deleted all the weird random apps that came on the unit and deleted sygic too). Would someone be able to post it somewhere?? Has anyone had any luck with other offline navigation apps? Again I have tried loading a few apks (of tomtom and sygic) i found online before deciding which to buy (theyre quite pricey) but I cant get any of them to work well. Sygic just crashes, or cant read the maps, tomtom never finds satellites although my gps tester says there are many. I really just need something for the very few times I may be lost without 4G data coverage. Has anyone had any luck installing a navigation app with the GPS maps on the external SD??

Google Voices

When using Google Maps, the voice seem primitive. It is very robotic and old. There have been a few times on a unique direction that my unit will use a "newer" sounding voice. But then switches back to the old voice for the rest of the directions. I thought installing the Google TTS (text to speech) and downloading the english language would help. It didnt. Is there a way to get "newer" voce files? Even my other navigation app Waze sounds much older than the version on my phone which sounds almost human.

Google Play Music

When I have Play Music shuffle through all my songs or the songs in a playlist, it oftentimes has a hard time continuously playing. It will get hung up and give an error, or play the next song in silence. I often have to stop and press play for the music to play. It happens when the app is in the foreground or background. I have tried enabling and disabling the cache of music, and setting the audio preference in system settings to prioritize 3rd party apps... and cant think of anything else. I have been having this issue intermittently, although i think there were times that it did work perfectly so I feel like it is possible.

On an interesting note that could potentially be related to this, I had really weird audio issues when i first got the unit, where only the video app and the music app would "grant" my 3rd party apps audio access. Otherwise they would be silent while playing music. The phone app would not switch audio between the phone back to the music... After reading about the "choose model" options in the thread, I tried the "color" model to see if I could change the LED colors (you cant on the single volume knob style...) After setting it to model "color" , my audio handling seemed to work BETTER and I can now use the Disc app as the "granter of audio" (first stock app to open) which is convenient because it auto closes and takes me to my desktop on startup. I feel like that could have been what fixed my google play music. I will try setting the unit as color again and report back tomorrow. But im not hopeful.

Sorry this is so long, I really wish we had a better forum setup with topics and subtopics from purchasing, to installing, to app/accessory compatibility. My main objective for now is to get the BASIC FUNCTIONALITIES of Android 4.1 (Google now, maps, music...etc) working as they should.