Review on 🚗 Sony XAV-AX5000 7-Inch Apple CarPlay and Android Auto Media Receiver with Bluetooth by Alexa Gay

The sound is good and it suits my car so I thought I had a great start. Having used it for several months now, I have a long list of complaints; They can all be summarized as a user interface. First, the steering wheel controls have a huge lag (5-10 seconds) when changing channels on Sirius or iPhone (BT or CarPlay). Thought it might have been the SW control module, I instead switched channels using the physical buttons on the bottom of the unit. Same backlog! There is no lag when using the touchscreen. In FM mode, the steering wheel controls are incredibly responsive (and the volume always adjusts). So this is one unit. It's ridiculous that something as simple as changing a channel should work so badly. In addition, the functionality of SiriusXM is severely limited. The SiriusXM radio I bought has many features that this Sony doesn't seem to support, like pause and rewind (to name a few). I can live without it, but the biggest issue with the lack of true SiriusXM support is that there's no buffering. Every time I pass a big tree or a "dead zone" I lose signal. I eventually found out that it doesn't buffer at all, so even losing signal for a second will result in audio dropping. With a lot of lag when switching channels or songs using steering wheel controls and physical buttons, I was hoping to use the touchscreen to switch from channel to channel. That does not work. The interface literally requires you to take your eyes off the road to see and tap the channel icon on screen. Also note that touching the left or right side of the screen will not scroll through your preset channels, but through all channels. The UI is so poorly designed I can't believe Sony put their name on it.