[MTCD Android Head Units General] doitright:
Ok, so got the thing installed last night.

Well, sortof.

Seems that China can't make up its mind regarding how far the front of the radio sticks forward relative to the mounting holes. So my first attempt to mount it resulted in the radio's face sticking so far forward that my DDIN face plate wouldn't have been able to make it down to the dashboard.... assuming that the holes fit. More on that later.

Second attempt, I moved the radio back to the next set of holes on the mounting bracket, which are a bit more than 1/2" behind the holes that I had the UL135 mounted with. Ok, well depth is *better*, but now a bit too far back. Middle of the night, so as long as I can use the thing to route my way to work in the morning, I'm ok with that. Maybe on the weekend, I'll drill another set of holes about half way between the two sets I tried so far. That should line it up OK.

So the DDIN sizing. Another thing that China can't make up its mind on. The UL135 fit in the Toyota Tacoma Metra dash kit... very snugly in horizontal direction, roughly 1mm clearance in the vertical direction. This UL128N2 is about 2-3 mm too big to fit in that dash kit in BOTH directions. They *claimed* the UL135 to be 100mm x 178mm. They *claim* the UL128N2 to be 102mm x 178mm. I will tell you that the UL128N2 is WIDER than the UL135, despite the claimed equal width. And given the 2mm (actually more) increase in height and that I had at least 1mm of available vertical space, I *should* have been able to force it in. NOPE. The difference is much greater than that, and in both directions. If the UL135 really is 100mm x 178mm, then the UL128N2 is probably 104mm x 180mm. WHY? Oh, the reason is absolutely HILARIOUS, it is because they have a thin plastic ring around the glass digitizer. They ordered the GLASS to have dimensions matching the DDIN target, but didn't compensate for the thin (~1mm) plastic ring around it! Very typical of the way that China manufacturing works. Ok, so I was able to grab a file and open up the dash kit a little bit to make it fit, and now its ok.

So next up... actual functionality.

First observation; the AM radio frequency standard is set to something that is most decidedly NOT North American standard. The closest frequency I could get to my preferred station was off by 2 kHz. While it was adequate to get the station and understand, without TYPICALLY an overabundance of noise or added sound from the next station over, it definitely sounds bad. Thanks so much China, for giving me a well working AM radio tuner! With any luck, I'll be able to hack the program to tune the proper frequencies.

On the physical utility of the unit, when you look past the "size" issue, its not bad. As expected, the screen is much more convenient without the deep bezel around it as the UL135 had. In order to achieve this, they replaced the physical control buttons with a row of capacitive buttons. Those buttons are pretty well useless, you can't reliably press them without focusing carefully on them. That is what is often called "distracted driving". I would go so far as to say that this row of buttons is DANGEROUS to try to use. Not only that, but the row of buttons is ***COMPLETELY REDUNDANT***. After all, they are just duplicates of the home/back/volume buttons that are already present on the SystemUI upper panel anyway, and, of course, the STEERING WHEEL BUTTONS (for those who have them hooked up). Why did they even bother to include that row of buttons? Because.... CHINA! Oh well.

Next up; there are some serious bugs when it comes to AUDIO ROUTING. If the radio is playing, and GPS voice comes on; radio mutes. Oh, it STAYS muted until you go BACK into the radio application, which seems to trigger a reset of the audio routing. This improved once I set google maps as the default nav application, now it just volumes down the radio to "pretend" to play the GPS sounds, and volumes it back up after.

Well, starting with the "included" ancient version of google maps... while it does make sound, it gets clipped by about 3 seconds at the start of the sound. So you miss about the first 3 seconds of the instruction. Update google maps to the latest version, and no sound comes out at all. Ok, what is happening with the newer one is that it is trying to use an audio pathway that is obviously BROKEN on these units. So that means that there isn't going to be any voice nav from google maps until either (a) THEY fix the audio routing problems, or (b) WE fix the audio routing problems. I'm not sure yet if there is an audio routing policy file that we can configure, or if this is something hard baked in somewhere. That's very annoying, but something I can live with for now. I prefer the newer google maps enough to live with the lack of voice guidance, rather than to try to use the ancient version.

DPI: Obviously, Android believes that the screen is as large as a TELEVISION. The fonts are all incredibly small, even if you set it to HUGE font. Ok, so right angle triangle has H = root(1024*1024+600*600)=1186.83 pseudopixels. Divide that by 7, makes 170 DPI. Its set to 160 DPI, so Android thinks that the screen is 7.4 inches. Ok, that's not really too far off from reality, but it IS in the wrong direction, to make everything look SMALLER than it should be. The problem is that the screen is roughly 3 feet away from your face. Take a tablet and how far do you hold it away? Roughly 1.5 foot. So lets figure out how big Android should *THINK* the screen is, in order to blow things up to the same scale as a 7" tablet at 1.5 foot.

We're dealing with right triangles again, 7:3 = x:1.5, x = 3.5. Android should think that the screen is 3.5 inches. That puts it up at 338 DPI. Ok, so these numbers are pretty rough, since I'm just guessing the viewing distances, but you get the idea. Crank that DPI WAAAAAAAY UP! Only problem I see, however, is regarding how they coded the SystemUI. If they followed the Android design guidelines, then they coded it with DP's (density independent pixels), which means that when you crank the DPI far enough to make applications look proper, it will make the CHINA look HUGE. Think about it -- they designed their SystemUI panels to show at a "normal" size when the DPI is set way too low. I can see bad things happening.

I wonder if it would be practical to just SWAP OUT the chinese SystemUI for one built from source? That might actually be a practical way of repairing the UI. Might also be nice to rebuild the System Settings application from source. I'll have to go over it again, but I don't recall there being anything special about System Settings -- they just colorized it, broke the bluetooth part, and added a password to developer options. WHY???!?!

Like the American proverb says... "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" That ESPECIALLY goes for China, since if it ain't broke, they're GOING to break it.

And now, to BLUETOOTH.

Well, knew going into it that they futzed up the bluetooth settings as badly as they possibly could. Why? Because... CHINA. The good news is that they tried so hard to break it as badly as they could, that it was EASY to fix.

In fact, I had written up the most important fix WELL before I even had these head units. I will refer to my fix thread HERE: http://xdaforums.com/android-auto/m...elopment/bluetooth-settings-launcher-t3504526

There are two obvious problems with bluetooth on these units;

1) They deleted the System Settings button that brought up the Bluetooth settings. That is what I fixed in above thread.

2) They BROKE the bluetooth pairing pin prompt. On a normal Android device, when you try to pair with something from it, it will first try one or two "standard" pairing pins, and they don't work, then it will pop up a dialog requesting that you enter the device's pin. This one does NOT do that. It JUST tries to pair using whatever pin is hardcoded in the CHINESE bluetooth application. So while I haven't "fixed" this, there is at least a reasonably easy (if not particularly convenient) workaround. When it doesn't pair, you go into the chinese bluetooth application, change the pin there, and try again.

So the good news is this; the REAL MEAT of the bluetooth stack, is the product of INTEL. Not China. That means that once you work around the severely broken UI (again, WHY BREAK it when you can just leave it be and have it ACTUALLY WORK?), it actually works WONDERFULLY! That means you can connect to AND USE multiple devices at the same time. I.e., torque + **ANY** OBD device, while simultaneously a voice call AND bluetooth data tethering.

Hmm, what else....

Bootup.... this is a very dramatic change from the UL135.

A full bootup takes about 20 seconds.

So when you get into your car in the morning to go to work, after it has been sitting all day, you turn the key, and it is IMMEDIATELY UP. Wait, what? Its wired correctly -- if the +12 and IGN were reversed, then it would lose power with the ignition switch off, which means that it would have to do a full bootup. If the IGN wasn't connected at all, then the screen will never turn on -- when the IGN turns off, the screen goes off, radio stops playing, and another thing I observe, is that bluetooth connections are lost. So, either the thing is only doing a partial shutdown and proceeding to "drain the battery" mode, or they have actually made it sleep *correctly*, switch off all the parts that suck down the power, put the CPU into deep sleep (clock off), and sit there draining negligible power until it receives a wakeup interrupt (IGN line powers up). If that is so, then I am VERY pleased, at least with this element.

On performance and stability;

Its better than the UL135 across the board here. This thing is no rocket, the CPU is actually quite a TURD, though definitely better than RK3188 (despite lower benchmarks). The increased RAM helps with keeping things in memory and responsive. The stability is a night and day improvement over the UL135, which I believe to be attributable to the INTEL element. eMMC performance is abysmal.

Summary so far;

1) The front panel is bigger than DDIN.

2) The front panel sticks out a different amount than UL135.

3) The audio routing policy is BORKED.

4) The UI is ALL CHINA.

5) The Bluetooth stack is INTEL :)

6) Performance is "OK". Nothing special.

7) Wakeup after sitting all night is INSTANTANEOUS.