[Verizon Galaxy S 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] btonetbone:
Hey everyone -

I'm posting this here since it's related to our S5's now that Lollipop is out. I'm hoping that some of you may have recent Honda cars from the past few years with the HondaLink system, since this should pertain to quite a few models. I originally posted this on 9thgencivic.com about my 2015 Civic EX.

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OK, this might be a long post. I'll start with tl;dr. Despite promises and initial attempts to incorporate MirrorLink 1.1 and enable mirroring between Android phones and our head units, it looks like Honda has failed. It's not just that they aren't implementing, but I believe they tried and just didn't have the engineering prowess to figure it out.

Here are some videos of me showing how I have come to this assumption:

Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfO_cQFRwgg

Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LcRlHkg0ik

And an image showing that my phone supports MirrorLink 1.1

So here's the full story. As I stated in an earlier post, I was in touch with someone from Honda corporate who told me that despite all of the previous promises, Honda will NOT be adding support to enable Android integration into our cars. It's also been widely known (assumed?) that our cars have MirrorLink 1.1 support; this is visible inside the diagnostic menus and multiple people have been told this by Honda.

Earlier this week, Verizon pushed out an update to Samsung S5 phones, upgrading the operating system to Lollipop/Android 5.0. I was going through the phone's menus, and noticed that there is a new MirrorLink option in Settings. I also saw elsewhere on the phone (photo above) that it's MirrorLink 1.1. Needless to say, I was VERY excited about what this may mean for us!

I went home, pulled out a USB cable, and tried my hardest to get my phone and car to see each other. Through regular options, I couldn't do anything new. However, when I went into Honda's diagnostic menus (hold Power + Menu + Eject on the car stereo) and then into the Unit Function menu and then down to the MirrorLink menu, I started to see some information.

The MirrorLink menu was reporting that it was seeing my phone! It had basic information about the time/date that it was plugged in and my phone's model. Clicking on the bottom buttons inside that menu, I could see MORE info. Specifically, I could see that the car and phone were trying to connect, but the car was reporting "Parameter Information Error" and some other errors statuses. You can see this in the first video above.

While in that submenu, I unplugged and replugged the USB cord in the bottom of my phone a few times. This is where things get even more exciting! My phone actually entered MirrorLink mode!! Unfortunately, the car was still spitting back error messages. Instead of just showing a "Disconnected" state, though, I started seeing various states such as "Connecting" "Speech Recognition Impossible" and "No Music Application". Additionally, on the car's main menu, the big "Link" icon now reads a new error: "Unable to start the app. When safe, please check your mobile device." You can see this in the second video above. Unfortunately, that's as far as I can get. I couldn't get anything to mirror.

So here's my assumption. Honda's engineers tried to implement MirrorLink and simply failed. We have what are essentially the remnants of their attempt throughout the menus. They won't be upgrading our system because they just simply don't have the software engineers capable. And now I'm just hoping that this is the only engineering fail that they have in our cars...

Hopefully someone else can find out some more info based on this. I still think we are very close to getting this working.