Concept Enterprises will ship in January a line of 10-inch Factory Fit radios using its own integration technology to work with various car models.
The line of budget radios, in 10.1- and 9- inch sizes, come with WiFi capability (when used with a hotspot) and can act as full Android tablets with the ability to connect wirelessly to the Google Play store. Users may download apps such as Waze or Google Maps for navigation.
The series starts at $599 and will be car specific, with at least a dozen different car models supported initially and more car models added throughout 2017. The radios will connect directly to the car’s wiring harness for plug and play installation. As Concept is using its own patent-pending integration technology for the radios, a separate module from a third party accessory company is not required.
“There isn’t much product out there with a screen as big as ours, with our connector technology that’s easy to install. And you see a lot of indash units from bigger brands and they are at a price point much higher….” said Concept’s Calvin Liu.
The radios retain all of the car’s steering wheel control and dashboard buttons, said Concept.
They come with dashboard trim kits to fit specific vehicles for a “Factory Fit” installation.
The radios are all Android based using quad or dual core processors. They support GPS and Bluetooth.
Concept will display the new Factory Fit Multimedia line at the Westgate Hotel during CES in Las Vegas next month.
It is smart to let Android do all the work for the user interface. No sense reinventing the wheel on that part. Now, if the finish work looks good on the bezels and Concept can keep the product from just getting blown out on the internet this might be a viable product. As soon as it ends up at super cheap prices direct to end users the life span will shrink dramatically. Letting product like this go direct to uneducated end users will kill these things. We’ve seen it so many times already.