aachowhan

First off let me say I don't work for these guys or advertising for them on their behalf. I have recently been frustrated with getting a decent solution to my Bluetooth audio.

First I bought a whole kit from Crutchfield to install new radio, after installing I ran into issues with humming noises and the dash kit not fitting nicely around the radio. Then I tried the iSimple with the AUX cord, it works reliably but the issue is even with the phone volume cranked up sometimes I have to turn the radio up to level 40. And then there is the issue with always plugging in my phone and unplugging which got annoying.

Then I decided screw it let's the the SL3B from VAIS Tech. Installing it was easy but it kept dropping my connection and I am now about to return it.

After all this I was poking about and found this company called GROM and they have this crazy upgrade thing that uses Android as a base and completely covers the factory system. Check it out:


Only issues I see is that you have to use your phone as a WIFI Hotspot if you want to use some of it's features. The good part is that it fully integrates into the existing system, but it is a bit pricey. I really want to try it out.

SkiMe

That looks pretty cool, thanks for the info.

I looked it up and the one shown above is the "Mac Daddy" which is very nice ($500). Well integrated, uses more updated mapping from Google, and you can listen to all sorts of things via Bluetooth, USB or Aux Input.
I chatted with a person there and they have several other, cheaper options too. If you just want to utilize Bluetooth or USB, they have a separate component to do just that ($150).

Going with the nicer unit and having updated mapping is attractive. No sense in buying another updated map CD for the Toyota database.

jdmRX

I have this GROM audio vline system installed on my 07 RX350. It's not a fully vetted system and has A LOT of bugs. Hopefully they can put out an update to fix all this. Otherwise I would not pay as much as I did for this system. The following issues I currently have:

- If you do not initiate the system once you start up your car, you lose the ability to use the entire vline system. ie. start car, listen to radio, decide to use vline 5 minutes later..... NOPE, that doesn't work. (BIGGEST ISSUE!!)

- cold San Francisco mornings seems to either freeze or take A LONG time to boot up the vline system. same goes for sunny days, the heat seems to mess with the system and you wont get it to boot up.

- the screen flickers every now and then (no, the connections are not loose, I triple checked)

- the bluetooth music function keeps pulling from my Spotify app even though I dont have it running.

hypervish

I have this in my 07' ES350, and I agree with JDMRX there are definitely some bugs (although they are different from the ones he is experiencing). I'm debating returning it at this point. Will see if GROM released any updates soon. They have already released one since it's release, but it hasn't helped much.