crs051767

Forgot to mention that I discarded it, because it does not have HD FM. Hopefully they'll come out with a newer version that includes it.

DWPC

IIRC, this unit can be connected via an optional adapter directly to the Bose speaker wiring harness, i.e., bypassing the Bose amp. But connecting is one thing, sound quality from a std amp output signal to the proprietary low impedance Bose speakers is another matter.

seafeye

Got this reply from one of the sellers:

mx22

Did you get in touch with them through one of the Ebay auctions or do they have a website?

GabePorsche - any update on the unit so far? Do you know if reverse camera can be connected to the unit by any chance?

seafeye

Yes i sent them a note from an ebay auction.
I don't buy into the "Bose" is the greatest. But for my ears the Bose system i have sounds great. The limitations of the becker unit is what has me wanting something different. I could go to a local stereo shop and get a double din unit but they don't look right. The ebay ad looks great. My only hesitation is that i don't want to mess up the sound. And i doubt that Bose/Becker is going to make it easy.

GabePorsche

I purchased via eBay but there website is sundaybuy dot com. I have the reverse camera installed and it's working great! So far, no complaints on this unit.

GabePorsche

They sent a cable that was too short. I ended up getting a reverse camera and a small amp. I went way over budget by $900, but it was worth it!

DavieGravy

How hard is it to run the cable to the amp in the trunk? What has to be removed as far as interior trim?

GabePorsche

Since I let the professionals do it, I didn't watch the whole time. What I did notice when I went back to take a look was they had the side panels(by the seat belts) off to run wires for the Camera & Amp. They also ran the GPS antenna under the dash in the middle so it sits on top of the vent in the middle. It took them about 5 hours to do everything, but everything's hidden perfectly.

DavieGravy

Thanks for sharing this info. It sounds like this is the best stereo upgrade option compared to all the others.

DWPC

I'm curious whether the bypass wiring had some hefty resistors to compensate for the oddball Bose speaker impedances.

sureshot

Hi All,

New member here.

I am posting because I may be of some help guiding decisions here. I'm going to try and be as comprehensive as I can, but if you have any questions after reading this, feel free to PM me. Feedback about these units on the net is very scarce, with nothing useful on Youtube and very little even on forums........so for those of you intrigued by this option.....read below!

The buying experience:


Like many, I wasn't impressed by the PCM on my 2008 CS - unlike the rest of the car which I adore. Not wanting to upset the Wife by spending thousands on an upgrade, I thought about buying one of these units for some time before taking the plunge. I ordered from Aliexpress. The price I paid for the quad core Android version was about $280 USD I think, plus I also ordered the Bluetooth OBD reader for another $10. There were a couple of identical looking units also for sale for a little less, but shipping was free with this seller at this price and it wasn't with the others, so it all worked out a few bucks cheaper.

Shipping was via DHL I think and it arrived in about 5 days. Much quicker than I expected for free shipping. I did ask the seller a few questions before I ordered and they were replied to quickly and somewhat intelligibly. Buyer experience was a little difficult as phrasing your questions needs some thought, but they were friendly and quick.


The Installation:

My CS has the factory BOSE amp and I wanted to keep using that amp and the speakers, primarily to keep quality up and costs down. This requires the purchase of a MOST Fibre Adaptor. The seller I bought the head unit from sells these for about $120 USD, but I declined that option and bought one from another vendor on Aliexpress for about half that price. If you have a BOSE system, it won't integrate with the new head unit without the fibre adaptor. If you want to bypass the amp, then the head unit comes with a wiring harness that allows you to do that and use the head units built in amp. As I said, I wanted to keep the BOSE, so I stumped up another $60 or so. The unit comes with a canbus adaptor. As I understand it, this enables you to use some of the steering wheel controls and also provides data for the reversing camera (more about that later). In all, there's two options for wiring harnesses, one including the canbus adaptor. Fitment and quality of connectors and harnesses was as good as anyone else, with all connectors being keyed uniquely so they can't be plugged in incorrectly unless you are not that bright and force them. Using the MOST Fibre adaptor requires a power source, and the wire colour codes enable quick identification of those to use. These can be cut and your adaptor spliced in and heat shrunk down quite easily. Now the tricky bit. The wiring harness, MOST adaptor and Canbus adaptor are quite a lot bulkier than the just the original factory cabling. This means being patient at install time placing all the stuff so that you have enough room in the dash cavity to stow it all. I found the best solution to be to place the Canbus and Most boxes in the side of the cavity, where they can kind of tuck in out of the way. This though, means tight work connecting up the back of the unit, but it can be done with a bit of patience.

I did not use the factory GPS antenna, opting instead to use the one supplied, this was partly because I couldn't be bothered to mess about with Fakra adaptors and partly because I thought I would give the supplied one a try first and see if it worked out - which it did. It has a long enough cable to route under the dash, out under the glove box and up below the A pillar to the top of the dash. It's a small receiver and is black, so in my car (which has the black interior) it is fairly unnoticeable.

My unit came with a camera and GPS maps included in the price. The maps are pre-loaded onto a MicroSD card and work very well, but I opted not to use the camera, as it looks a bit flimsy and too "aftermarket". My car didn't come with a factory camera, so adding this feature is a big bonus. I ordered a different design which replaces the licence plate light, and although it was supposed to be a direct plug and play type solution, it required a bit of modification to get it to fit. It replaces the original licence plate light on the right side and the screw holes did not quite align, but with a bit of drilling, it worked out. The picture quality is pretty good. The rear view also incorporates "tracking lines" so you can see where you will be reversing to and a proximity zone colour scale to show how close to stuff you are. With the tracking lines, I assume it gets this data from the Canbus as it follows the steering input in real time. It also does not seem to require power tapping at the rear to feed the camera. I was expecting to have to splice into the reversing light circuit, but it tested out fine without that. While the rear-view camera is in use, audio from the unit can be automatically reduced or suspended, presumably to help you concentrate! Routing the camera wire back to the tailgate isn't too hard, but the trim can be a pain at the rear tailgate and so can fishing through the grommets and seals. The unit also allows for front and rear "dashcam" input recording to the 16gb onboard memory, but as I have a separate system already, I left that alone. I haven't wired up the AV in and AV out for two reasons. One is because I haven't secondary screens in the back to display on, and also because I haven't yet found factory looking ports to integrate into the interior so they don't look conspicuous.

All other wiring and connections are straightforward, and if not using the MOST adaptor, I could easily see an estimate of 10-15 minutes being achievable to plug and play the basic functions. Camera and GPS will take a little longer, as will routing USB leads, AV out and routing the dash recorder cameras if you choose to use them.

I will try and get some pics together when I open it all up again to install the rearview camera.


Functionality:

Well, it is light years above PCM for the 2008 MY. I can use a microSD card to play files from, or upload into the unit's internal memory. So far I have loaded over a thousand tunes and 5 longish movies into the internal memory and no warnings of max capacity. There are also two USB ports with leads so you can connect and route where you like. I haven't finished this bit yet, still work in progress as I am awaiting some USB sockets so I can have them look factory-ish rather than have leads lying about (I'll post pics when finished). There are AV in/Out (the yellow video and red/white female leads) too, although I haven't any intention of bothering with these, but it gives you the facility to output your movies to rear mounted screens I suppose. As I said above, I ordered the OBD II reader. This took a while to pair with the unit, but eventually it did and has worked well ever since. I downloaded a free app to the unit (torque lite) which shows all sorts of functions and allows the display and cancellation of fault codes, etc. My iPhone5 paired with the unit very quickly snf it paired quickly with my android phone too, a Galaxy S7. This gives me access to the internet on the unit using my phone. I can also pair the unit with my home wifi, which I did to do most of the app downloads. It also works with public wifi at coffee shops and so on. The unit has A2DP streaming from my phone's memory too, as well as the usual bluetooth, but does not seem to support Mirrorlink, but I haven't really looked into that too closely, so it might. The system comes with a separate microphone for calls and it works well and plugs into the rear of the unit. There is enough cable to route it up to the top of the steering column, so voice pickup is great. Sound quality at both ends is very good although the ringer seems to be quite loud and limited in volume adjustability. The unit can also act as a wifi hotspot, again using your phone to handle the data. I noticed an annoying interference when the wifi is enabled, kinda like dialling noise or pips, but as I only enable the wifi when I need it, it's off most of the time and the noise is not present. It's the only thing really that is a problem with this unit -other than that I can't figure out how to tune into AM stations yet, FM is fine. Playback sound quality is very good, and working through the BOSE amp and speakers, is loud and it suffers from no significant fidelity or volume loss. In fact, I would say it is better than it was through the stock unit although I don't claim to be an audiophile.
Movies can be played back through DVDs, MicroSD, USB, on board memory or the AV input. Screen resolution is very good, although the size of the screen is not huge at about 7", but it is certainly quite watchable. The android interface is good with movable tiles and swiping with touchscreen functionality. It all works great. The unit takes about ten seconds or so to boot up from cold. If restarting after only a few minutes, startup is instant. If using mp3s for music, the display shows the album cover and music info. This info is NOT displayed in the centre gauge cluster and neither is any other relating to the unit. I personally don't miss that as the benefits of this unit vastly outweigh such a small loss.
Steering wheel functionality is good for volume control and next/previous track/station, etc. Scan doesn't seem to do anything much and I haven't figured out if I can program the other wheel controls or not. Probably can, but may need to update/change the Android OS, which I'm not willing to play about with right now. The boot screen comes default as an animated Porsche crest. I changed the background screen to a different one of a Porsche crest. default is a plain background. This is done by loading a picture and selecting it in Settings as a new background. All very simple stuff.
The GPS is very good. It starts faster than my TomTom and is updateable (apparently). The maps it came with seem very current in my area, so I haven't worried too much about updates. It works very nicely though, being easy to input and you can even twist the image to view from different directions, pretty neat. It all functions very much like you would be used to from any other GPS - or better. When you leave the GPS app, it tells you that the signal has been lost, but in reality it hasn't it's just that you exited the app. Only odd thing about the GPS really.

Bad stuff:

A couple of times the unit has sort of frozen. When it does this, none of the buttons work, including the power on/off. It's only done it twice and needs the ignition switching off and the key removed and it will reset. Not much use if you are on the highway and can't easily stop, but like I said, not happened much and I have had the unit in for a couple of months now. It would not come even remotely close to being a reason not to buy this unit though, it's that infrequent and (at the price) the unit is that good. Being really, really critical, the buttons on the unit are a little "light" feeling, not as solid as you are accustomed to with Porsche, and again, being nitpicky, the instructions to install are not good (because they are non-existent) and the operating instructions are for a slightly different OS, but as it is broadly similar and the OS supplied is pretty simple, this is not a big issue really.


The good:

It does what it is supposed to and is a massive improvement over stock. The unit fits perfectly into the dash. The pics on the seller's ad showing this are accurate. I didn't experience any issues with fit or connectivity, although as mentioned before, you have to plan the way you place all the cables and components into the dash. Fortunately, the cavity in the dash is pretty big with some useful nooks and crannies and does accommodate it all if you are careful. The fascia looks totally stock. The orange on the display is fairly good, being a close (but not perfect) match to the rest of the dash. With the OS it came with, I was not able to change the colour to be an exact match, but perhaps some of those units that are pricier do allow this. It is certainly shown as being customisable on some of the ads. Cost is phenomenally good, with head unit, OBDII reader, new camera and MOST adaptor totaling about $400usd shipped. It works great (except for the AM mystery and that pipping noise with Wifi, which I think is unsolvable but not a big issue) with so much more to offer than the old head unit. For the money, there isn't anything else out there to touch it that I have seen. Mobridge/Dension are much more money for much fewer features, and if you want to go buy a more expensive Pioneer or Alpine, you have dash mount kits and MOST adaptors still to buy anyway. I really am a big fan!


Conclusion:
I have a lightly used PCM head unit and GPS DVD unit for sale if anyone wants them! PM me!

sureshot

This is the completed install. Angle of photo is not great as it makes the image on the screen look pale where it is actually quite bright and can be adjusted in the settings. The angle also makes it look like the mounting bracket between the unit and the bezel is visible (to the left of the left dial and to the left of the dvd slot) but they aren't really, it's just taken from the one unnatural angle at which they are noticeable......blame the photographer!

I'll edit up some more pics and post soon.

sureshot

Some pics:

Some of the cables, parts and connections:

uphoto

Wow, great post! Thank you for the info and pics.