[Android Head-Units] octadox:
quick review of the universal c300 i just installed:

best described as a tinkerer's wetdream/nightmare, with some engrish subtitles. in other words, it's far from perfect, but in some ways it is the best solution available, if you don't mind messing about with it.

some immediate issues:

1. it's 178mm x 100mm. your double-din opening is 173x98. this means you will have to enlarge the opening or shrink the stereo (i suggest enlarging the opening) -- in either case, the installation is not as easy as it would be if this were a standard size.

2. google contacts do not sync (ownice has promised to look into it and fix in the next firmware release, but i wouldn't hold my breath). this means you cannot push the voice button and go: "call wife," since the unit doesn't know who your wife is.

3. google voice works like it should, for the most part, once you work through some kinks -- it will play music you ask it to, using your player of choice and it will navigate to a location, although it uses google maps (not waze) to do so. like siri (it looks things up on the internet and will play music for you, but doesn't do advanced things that you are used to it doing on your phone, like telling to navigate to a friend's house). it also doesn't read the results outloud to you (which is a shame, since the whole reason to use the voice feature is to keep your attention on the road.)

4. bluetooth is crippled, so it will connect to your phone and to *some* ELM327 connectors, but not anything that doesn't accept 0000 for a password.

5. lack of physical buttons -- cool looking and seems like a great idea until you try to use it while driving and realize that you can't feel your way to anything, since it's just a flat touch-screen. i'll likely get used to this, but definitely takes your attention off the road (ignore this if you have steering wheel controls).

6. the main screen's two widgets are not removable (for now).

7. it won't read your SMS messages. I am sure that there's a way to forward them (via something like IFTTT) from the phone to the stereo, but that seems to be more trouble than it's worth.

8. you need your phone to act like a hotspot for waze (and anything else that uses the internet) to work, and it appears that android 5.0+ doesn't allow you to automate turning the hotspot on and off anymore, which is not awesome, since you now have to remember to turn it on when you get in the car and off when you get out.

9. poweramp doesn't work right, because it doesn't provide you with a settings button, so there's no way to customize it.

couple of correctable issues (and notes on what i did to correct them):

1. contrast set way too high to be usable out of the box: enter the service menu through car settings > about car > settings icon > 1260 (password) and change contrast to be about 10-15 or so.

2. volume way too loud, usable range of volume slider is about 1/3 of total slider: enter service menu and set the volume for items that your stereo has to -20; this gives a good usable range for the slider and prevents your wife's eardrums from bursting when she accidentally hits max volume (oops).

3. if you find that you can't watch videos (they just won't load), check the setting that decides whether you are allowed to watch videos while moving -- it should warn you that you can't see the video because it's blocked, but it doesn't.

4. boot logo password is 9999, in case you don't want to see the "OWNICE" on boot.

summary:

if you are looking for something cheap that will work with your car, get a name-brand stereo that has bluetooth connectivity to your phone (and perhaps some sort of onboard nav system, if you care about such things) for about the same money as this and call it a day. sure, it won't have android, you won't be able to surf the web, or play spotify, and won't have waze/google maps, but it also won't give you nearly as many headaches as this unit will.

on the other hand, if you want android functionality (or just the ability to use waze as your nav system in-dash), then you don't really have a better choice. one of the key things for me was that this unit will power up in <3seconds for 48 hours from the last time it was powered up. When "cold" booting, it takes just under 20 seconds to boot from 0 to usable. Most things work exactly as you would expect them to, and they work well. For example, if listening to music, and your nav wants to say something, it will mute the music, say it's thing and return the music. Sounds simple, but if you read enough of these forums, you will see that not all of these units handle this properly.

as you can see from the above, my list of issues is longer than my list of praises, but that's because i don't bother praising things that work the way they are supposed to. overall, without knowing how it will handle extended use or how it will hold up to the heat inside the car, etc, etc, the unit seems good, and was the best option for what i wanted to do. my other options were the nex4200 and the jbl that's coming out in a month or two, since both of those are android auto... but android auto doesn't do waze, which is too bad.

if you do buy this one, i would buy from ownice directly (via aliexpress), a 1024x600 version cost me about $200, shipped for free and arrived 1 week from order date (actually less than a week).