The large screen, 10-inch radio has been growing in popularity and is now an important category in its own right.
The top radio in this category, according to Circana (formerly NPD), in terms of dollar sales at retail, January through September, was the Kenwood DMX1057XR. The high end eXcelon Reference model offers a High Definition 3-position floating screen and wireless CarPlay/Android Auto at $1,299 street price.
Here are all the top five sellers:
Top In-Dash Car Radios With 10.1-inch Screens, January-September 2023 by Dollar Sales to Consumers
| KENWOOD | |
| Pioneer | |
| Stinger | |
| KENWOOD | |
| JVC |
Source: Circana, Retail Tracking Service, U.S.
Glad to see Kenwood/JVC in the top categories. Especially noting how many cheap, no name brands are out there in this category. I’ve got to say I’m surprised to see the Stinger in that group. I’m sure it has a lot do to with their distribution of that category. Every shop in town has the opportunity to sell them. Not to mention their aggressive direct to consumer platform. Not sure why so many dealers support them in this category. If any other name brand such as Kenwood or Alpine were to pull that, the dealers would cry foul and threaten to drop the entire line.
I have to agree with the comments made in regards to LinksWell / Android no name radios. We’ve seen so many failures of customer provided Android tablet style radios that we had to make an exception for them, which is we will politely decline installation of these units. At first we would just bench test them prior to install, but even then they would fail within days or even hours after install. And trying explaining to the customer that we did everything right. We would waste so much time with these units that we didn’t even sell. Not worth the headache…
Were any of the failed units you removed actual LinksWell radios?
The majority of the Android radios are all coming from the same factory and being rebranded. They are developed with a different build philosophy, “sell as many as possible.” We actually seek to make the best product we can. Spending extra money and time in using better components, firmware, and dealer support.
We have in house tech support for all our dealers. We staff our own engineers. We do all our own R&D. We own our manufacturing factory and we manufacture our own radios and they are not shared among other brands. We only sell B to B, we do not sell direct to the retail public. We guard MAP and our dealers. So there are may cheaper options that do fail due to either cheap hardware or incomplete firmware. Or companies that sell past the dealer direct through eBay, amazon, Alli, and so on. But at LinksWell we are a very different company and product. I would never say we are with out issues, but no manufacturer is without issue. And the more features and options you offer, the higher the percentage of something may fail. That is the nature of technology. The more things you can do, the more things there are to not work correctly. But when something isn’t working our engineers start working on figuring out why and releasing firmware updates to fix it. We don’t leave issues unaddressed.
I believe there have been many Android radios that have been installed and failed quickly, I just don’t believe LinksWell radios to be grouped in with the over arching statement that “All Android Radios suck and always break”. Because we would fix it, we have radios in cars still working for over 4 years (as far as we can go back because that’s about when we started making them). So being a guy in the work of development, testing, and tech support, I have a real and honest understanding of what is happening across the board for us in that. Do we run into issues? Yep, who doesn’t, but we fix them. Do we have a less than a year life span? Nope, not at all. Do we have a 90% failure rate? Not even close. We would be out of business years ago if we did.
Now, I will step off my soap box with just this last thing, If they have been LinkWell Radios I would hope for the chance to fix the issue on behalf of you and your customers.
I’m not suprised to see JVC/Kenwood Corp taking 3 of the top 5 spots. I own 2 of them personally, and sold tons of them. But Sony had some big price reductions and the huge slurge of putting out 1000’s of demo system on the market made me assume the 9500 would have been top 5 as well. The os is far more OEM like and easier to understand and it’s a single dinn mount with Meastro.
Very intrested to see how this plays out next year. The JVC/Kenwood options are already several years old (I think 2019 release).
How small. LinksWell has a few of those small ones but most are 12.1″ or 15.6″. And the Gen VI with Qualcom processor are awesome.