Technology moves so very quickly. So when we added a 2010 BMW 128i convertible to our garage, NOT having CarPlay was simply unacceptable. I came upon this AutoABC unit because it claimed to do just what we wanted: CarPlay and a larger, brighter touch display in the BMW. The price was more than right (you can pay less if you look around, but also a LOT more if you buy the same thing from a US vendor). The package arrived within just three days: Display with housing, wire harness, USB cable, AUX cable, some clamps, and a fairly brief color manual that was good, but still suffered from translation.

Installation was, depending on how adept you are with doing stuff in cars, fairly simple or quite involved. It definitely pays to watch YouTube vids on how to go about taking things out of the BMW dash. And routing all the cables through the guts of the BMW…. brrrr. Still I got all that done in a few hours (and also installed a backup camera while I was at it — highly recommended).

I did encounter one hardware problem: the housing/adapter of the new 10.25-inch display did not fit all the way into the OEM display cutout on top of the BMW dash. I had to widen the cutout in a couple of areas. And there are no instructions on how to secure the whole thing onto the dash.

Anyway, the Linux-based system boots up very fast, like six seconds (supposedly much faster than Android-based units). The interface looks great, and CarPlay works great. Having a backup cameras was great. Just one problem: initially I didn’t have CarPlay sound. The car radio worked fine, but anything from CarPlay only had sound on the iPhone. It took me quite some time to figure out how to get it to work. The secret is to connect the CarPly system wirelessly to the iPhone Bluetooth and Wifi, but NOT the car’s own Bluetooth! The manual did not make that whole process clear.

One thing: the big screen sticks out much more than the BMW’s dim OEM screen. If you can live with that, this is an awesome, inexpensive way to get CarPlay and the Android equivalent into an older car.

Installed easy woks good

The product works perfectly as expected. The sound quality through bluetooth is perfect. The original iDrive is also working well.
The installation of all cables was quite easy but the holes of the two small metal pieces to fix the screen mount into the dashboard are not precisely positionned resulting in a 5 mm gap between the plastic mount and the dashboard.
I will probably have to build my own pieces to fix this.