My mate Steve and I have previously upgraded car stereos, modern day Android units are quite good.
Original 2007 era Mitsubishi car stereo
He'd picked up a new old car for his missus and wanted a stereo upgrade for, we had both lamented how the exchange rate and the cost of good quality android head units have made an upgrade too expensive.
"But Steve you can get a single DIN head unit on AliExpress for $50!" After looking and thinking based on pictures, number of sales, some company research, I decided that the Navifly OD9 was worth a shot.
For interest: Navifly is the same company as Mekede which is a Shenzhen company in China that actually makes high end fancy Android head units. For some reason, they also drop these ultra-cheap units on the market under the name "Navifly". I noticed there were models OD1 to OD9; kinda looked like OD1 was a base model and OD9 was the most recent update...well...the OD1-OD8 were all quite small bodies whereas the OD9 had a chunk of electronics hanging out the back. I took that as a sign it might have a better power amp in it - that it needed the extra cooling the small ones didn't need.
What's in the box? All this, and a signed card from Johnny H himself!
Also that the OD1 was around $AUD30(2025) whereas the OD9 was $80. That is also a sign.
Look, I like to think that there are a bunch of smart interns working at Mekede, cutting their teeth down in the basement on the low end gear, trying to make the best head unit they can for a stupidly low budget using the best cheapest parts they can find...not that it is some scam where the thing works but is barely usable.
Trying to get the specifications, it's all a little cagey. It's that classic Chingrish "specifications" full of ridiculous colourful pictures of barely relevent salesy material. What I did mostly believe was it is a ~7inch 1280*480 touchscreen with GPS, reverse camera, lots of connectivity and it supports bluetooth Android Auto and Apple Carplay. Says it has 2GB of RAM and 32GB of flash memory. Supports steering wheel control - not that the Lancer has any. Oh, has a radio tuner. Of course...still relevant in 2025.
Fire it up on the bench, not bad, surprisingly responsive!
There is no specification of the CPU but it is believed to have a cheap quad core Cortex-A7 processor. So what they were putting in the Raspberry Pi 2. There was no talk about the power amp. However I pulled it apart and can confrim it has a YD7388S chip, which is a cheap knock off of the STMicroelectronics TDA7388, a 4 channel class AB power amplifier. The Chinese documentation for it says it is 19W per channel and to be honest - it's all you need for a head unit while keeping the original speakers.
So the only real way of knowing how good it is, other than watching youtube reviews, is to buy one and try it.
Who needs a harness? Cut, solder, heatshrink. Fortunately nothing much has changed in 20 years, every colour wire old to new was the same!
I took out a few screws to have a look inside, the back end houses the poweramp but also some RAM chips on a very busy double sided board. There are a bunch of ribbon cables heading the the screen, I'm not sure if there was another board in the main box, I didn't really care. "It's got a processor, I will be able to tell how good it is by using it."
What I found quite interesting is that the back is a die cast aluminium case with lots of holes (more surface area) and heat fin ribbing (even more surface area) to dissipate heat - but the power amp isn't bolted to it, it sits in a slot in a bath of heat goop! Pretty clever really, if it tansfers the heat adequately and the goop doesn't spill out and short out the board!
On the bench it drew 0.5A at 12V, running just the screen, no speakers connected. So if you have a 50 Amp hour car battery, yeah, you'll get several days...but hey don't leave your accessories on that long.
Front of main board
Back of main board
The die cast ally "heatsink" - see the pot of goop the poweramp sits in.
I didn't try too hard with the mounting, it sits there adequately.
The installation was pretty simple. I didn't bother with a harness, just cut, solder and heatshrink. The internet is full of wiring diagrams, you'll find one easily. There was no DIN type mounting for the old stereo, the new unit came with a cage I could install...I didn't bother. It's resting in place. Slack, yeah I know. I will attach it one day. Maybe.
It does everything you'd expect. WiFi, bluetooth, I logged in and updated some apps, installed a few more. The touch screen is responsive enough, the screen refresh rate is faster than I was expecting - I watched some videos and they played great! The 8:3 aspect ratio is not great for it though - but that's not the point. The colours were dull and there wasn't much contrast, I'm too used to OLED screens these days, but what do you expect for a cheap LCD backlit display?
Very pleased with the sound. Any car from the 2000's on and even some earlier will have 4 speakers that will handle 20W of power admirably. You won't hear any distortion until it already louder than you need. Sure if you want to annoy everyone at the traffic lights this won't get you that, but you'll you bopping with your mates just fine.
Drill some holes, mount the reverse camera, it will be fine.
The reverse camera it came with is adequate. It has some pretty bright LEDs that are always on when the camera is powered, so I mounted it on the plastic trim above the numberplate between the plate lights and ran a feed wire to the reverse lights. This car was pre-reverse cameras so I also ran that feed with the camera cable (old school RCA composite analogue signal) back to the head unit. Usual story - it takes just as long if not longer to run cables from the back of the car to the front of the car as installing the head unit!
So what's my verdict?
A really good piece head unit not just for the price, but actually a good bit of kit. There isn't anything more it needs - sure the screen could be more vivid but that's a first world problem.
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