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Navigation & AudioAudio upgrades, bluetooth, and navigation discussions surrounding the Clubman (R55), Cooper and Cooper S (R56), and Cabrio (R57) MINIs.
So I've been looking at this stereo replacement for a while and couldn't find any kind of worthwhile review on it so I took it on myself to take a gamble and see what was up.
I got it about two weeks ago and the first thing I'll say is this is not for the faint of heart. This is not gonna be a plug and play kind of install. As much as they make it out to be. Out of the box this thing sucks.
if you are willing to do the research and read, this will be the most bad *** radio available for the MINI.
It took me this long to get It to the point that I was even willing to share anything on this stereo. The stock software that come with these units is garbage and has to go. I'm running a custom Rom that you can find here
This model does not have a physical speedometer, but does have a digital one on the main page and the screensaver.
There is no sub rca outlet or rear rca outlet. Kind of shitty but you can make the front rca outlet work.
Gps works great.
To get the most out of the stereo, some sort of data is needed. I make my phone into a hotspot and run pandora and spotify.
I used the factory ubs plug by splicing into it. I'll add pictures and directions on that later and the second usb is inside the top globe box.
The internal mic is not as good as the stock mic but it works ok for phone calls. Bluetooth streaming works great. I don't use it since I stream everything.
I paid 467 shipped of some guy off of ebay. He was very responsive and very helpful when I had issues. I received the radio about one week after payment was made
See this would be a great use of a free data only SIM on my Project Fi plan! Sadly, I don't have a Chrono or SatNav package, so I'm not going to entrust my speedometer only to something such as this.
thoughts on trying to do this to a 2012 R59S ? lack of bluetooth for spotify is killing my drive music... I'm always willing to go above plug and play, but want to know exactly how much was needed besides a new rom install.
Nice install, thanks for the information I was just looking into this. I am new to the mini world and the only thing I don't love is the radio. My mini radio does not have good or Bluetooth. Thanks again for the insight.
