New IS250 owner and member and loving it!

[BeepBeep]

On 9/1/2021 at 12:07 PM, Ozzay said:

The only issue I have had with my IS250 is that I have the most basic one. I don't have any parking sensors and reverse cam unit and would like the radar control system as well. Other than that its great.

Have you retrofitted any parking sensors? My Is250 has the MK audio with reversing camera,

[McShmoopy]

3 hours ago, BeepBeep said:

is the Grom Vline 2 really worth £600? I'll be honest I want apple car play and Android auto but that seems like a lot of cheddar for what's a basic android TV box with some cables.

To be honest it is alot of money to part with, however it depends what you are after. With your vehicle being a pre facelift, you can easily get a much cheaper android head unit for as low as £100 and it will provide the full android experience as well as apple CarPlay. Now while you get this, you will lose the OEM functions of the cars infotainment and you'll need to tinker to get your existing parking camera to behave with the android unit. Not to mention Climate Control will not be as it was (sometimes this will be via buttons or a dedicated climate control app) and audio quality will be seriously degraded due to the cheapo Chinese DACs and components.

Now putting all that into perspective, if you don't care about the audio quality and retaining full OEM functionality the android unit does seem the better option. 

The benefit of the GROM is that it keeps all the OEM functions intact, and the biggest thing for me (being a musician / audiophile) the quality of the audio is not degraded in a significant way and my mark Levinson system sounds fabulous. For me that alone was worth  the money as I sought out my facelift IS F sport for a while because it was one of the new facelift vehicles I've seen with Mark Levinson audio as they seemed to not make it a standard option! 

[LittleCasper]

3 minutes ago, McShmoopy said:

To be honest it is alot of money to part with, however it depends what you are after. With your vehicle being a pre facelift, you can easily get a much cheaper android head unit for as low as £100 and it will provide the full android experience as well as Apple CarPlay. Now while you get this, you will lose the OEM functions of the cars infotainment and you'll need to tinker to get your existing parking camera to behave with the android unit. Not to mention Climate Control will not be as it was (sometimes this will be via buttons or a dedicated climate control app) and audio quality will be seriously degraded due to the cheapo Chinese DACs and components.

Now putting all that into perspective, if you don't care about the audio quality and retaining full OEM functionality the android unit does seem the better option. 

The benefit of the GROM is that it keeps all the OEM functions intact, and the biggest thing for me (being a musician / audiophile) the quality of the audio is not degraded in a significant way and my mark Levinson system sounds fabulous. For me that alone was worth  the money as I sought out my facelift IS F sport for a while because it was one of the new facelift vehicles I've seen with Mark Levinson audio as they seemed to not make it a standard option! 

Hmm yeah I wouldn't wanna screw up the aircon stuff, maybe I'll just put a few pennies in a tin each week and see if I've got enough in a year to buy one.

[McShmoopy]

3 hours ago, LittleCasper said:

Hmm yeah I wouldn't wanna screw up the aircon stuff, maybe I'll just put a few pennies in a tin each week and see if I've got enough in a year to buy one.

Definitely, the good thing is with yours being a pre facelift vehicle I believe the GROM works 100% OOB unlike mine which required some work haha.

I believe there is a group guy going on for the GROM unit on the Facebook group so you can get roughly £100 / $100 off so that might be worth a look!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/696386090967018/permalink/950461345559490/

[LittleCasper]

16 hours ago, McShmoopy said:

Definitely, the good thing is with yours being a pre facelift vehicle I believe the GROM works 100% OOB unlike mine which required some work haha.

I believe there is a group guy going on for the GROM unit on the Facebook group so you can get roughly £100 / $100 off so that might be worth a look!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/696386090967018/permalink/950461345559490/

Wow Thanks, I'll take a look.