Review on 🚗 CarlinKit 2.0 Wireless CarPlay Adapter for Audi Factory Wired Cars | Convert Audi A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 Q7 Q2 R8 Q5 MMI 2017-2021 to Wireless CarPlay by Marcus Dorgham

The bottom line is this device works as promised with my Kenwood 7704S aftermarket devices and pretty much gives the same CarPlay experience, with Exception for wireless connection. As for the issues raised by others: In my configuration, I don't see anything odd about the device getting confused and having to be unplugged and plugged back in after car power cycle - the lag comes in two forms. My head unit takes about 20 seconds to boot up (ridiculously slow!) and maybe 5 seconds to negotiate the Carplay connection. A full wireless connection takes about 30 seconds longer (about twice as long). We will discuss this in more detail later. So yes, I think it can be annoying in certain circumstances. It's normal for me because I always listen to my airfields and keep playing them until the audio goes to the head unit, so it's just an extra wait for carplay while I reverse the field or whatever. Second, once you have a Carplay connection, pressing something on the screen (like play/pause) responds a bit slower to notice at first, but you soon get used to it, it's not a problem. I have a good setup with a magnetic mount and am very used to just placing my iPhone on the mount and plugging in the cable. However, I am happy with this wireless device and will keep it to myself. The reason is the heat. I live in Los Angeles and for six months of the year if you drive yourself on AC most of the day the sun hits your phone so hard that after about half an hour the phone turns itself off to protect itself. Disabling takes many forms (often Carplay still works in terms of image and sound generation, but doesn't respond to any clicks; geolocation doesn't work, so automation that should work when I get closer to home doesn't work, etc.) I have Tried different options to hide the phone in a place where the heat wouldn't hit it, but none of the options worked. So I figured using this device (which is tucked under the dash where it's cool) and keeping the phone in my pocket, hit with AC again and protected from the sun would be the solution. And it really looks like it. I get the Carplay experience without the apprehensions I previously had about using Carplay for a long afternoon drive. Maybe I'll return to the wire in the fall? But probably not, the disadvantages of WLAN are actually quite small. You can connect an existing Lightning cable to the "USB output" of this dongle. When you connect the phone to it, the phone will be charged. But it does not establish a cable connection. Wireless always wins. Because of this there is some confusion in the phone, it seems to be trying to connect to a wired connection and then switches to wireless. I think there is an option here to make the dongle smarter, so in this case it uses a pure wired connection; as I would not recommend it. I switched my cables so the lightning cable now plugs directly into the USB car charger and powers the other device from the wireless car key to avoid confusion when I want to charge my phone while driving. So this problem (cable connection not working when it should) is a bug. The second mistake is that in my opinion the start can be much faster. This is one of the differences between Tier 1 electronics companies (e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft) and everyone else - Tier 1 companies care about download speeds and are constantly working to fix them. Obviously this dongle does the following: (1) it presents itself to the head unit as a CarPlay device, including creating audio and video streams (2) it presents itself to the iPhone as a head unit, receives wireless audio and video streams and transcodes them into a wired version. away so good. Consider starting now. The sequence goes something like this: (a) turn on [main unit and dongle] (b) both initialize their hardware and software (Kenwood is very slow because they didn't bother to optimize the Linux boot process ) (c) Kenwood is negotiating the CarPlay connection (the green Carplay button appears on the screen) (d) the dongle starts generating fake video data for Kenwood (welcome screens show the dongle name, the name of the phone it is connected to is connected, and everything) (e) during step d the dongle negotiates the connection with the iPhone (f) After this connection is established, the dongle starts transcoding the wireless Airplay audio/video stream to the wired version, and Carplay appears on the screen. an additional delay of 30 seconds showing step (d) during the negotiation of step (e). What the key SHOULD do is the moment the power is turned on, BEFORE it even pairs with the car's head unit, it needs to start with step (e), pair with the phone and establish a wireless connection. Then, when the head unit connects to the dongle (step c), the dongle can immediately start sending correct carplay data, skipping step d (fake carplay data for 30 seconds), and avoiding waiting for step e. So, like almost all electronics. Nowadays it's a mixed bag. Competent at what it does, but clearly a product of engineers not motivated by the pursuit of excellence :-(I'd be willing to pay a little more for excellence (damn, that's why I bought the iPhone, right? ?) , but unfortunately perfection is not usually offered.