Update -
I have received and fitted the stereo, which is an Android 6 model branded "Xeowyn".
Stereo Details - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/7-Ca...311.0.0.kQYQxT
Price: US $462.00 / piece
Discount Price: US $346.50
Seller Details -
The Aliexpress seller for this product,
Navitech is based in Guangdong, China. Their representative Lisa Peng speaks excellent English. She is very professional and responsive and I can highly recommend her store. I also picked up a reverse camera and an OBD2 from her (these are still in transit).
It was sent through GATI China (a group company of the Indian courier / transporter GATI) and while shipped promptly by the seller, it took several days to ship mostly because of 11/11 sale related delays at the courier. Lisa Peng @ the seller took the initiative to contact the courier when I reached out to her after 10 days were past, and they shipped it immediately.
By some miracle, Indian customs didn't charge a single paisa of duty on the deck!!!
Installation -
The build quality is solid - a heavy duty aluminium box for the stereo hardware and solid plastics that match the color of your fiesta dash. The wiring is heavy duty and with good quality connectors. The old Nokia type keypad control panel on your Fiesta that has phone / aux selectors, number dialling etc is retained in place and works out of the box with this new deck.
The installation is plug and play for the Fiesta's existing stereo except one or two things -
1. Supplement the old USB 2 cable on the stock deck with an USB 3 cable ++ extender because the old cable is a bit too short.
2. The stereo unit takes a little effort to fit into the bay from which the old Fiesta stereo was removed because there are several additional cables available to connect Reverse Camera, TPMS etc, so these take up a good bit of space. The install is quite neat (the addon USB cables fitted into the glovebox).
They seem to have reverse engineered all of Ford Sync's features so the sensor alerts such as door open, AC temperature etc are all displayed on the stereo. This might be because of the CANBUS decoder they fitted that had an older Ford Sync firmware version stamped on it (v 1.52.0058YPT5 instead of the v 1.59 that the stock stereo has).
A small antenna for the GPS chip is placed onto your dashboard.
The device has SIM connectivity and wifi available so you can install Google Maps from the play store (after either inserting a SIM or as I have plenty of unused data, I just connected to wifi from my phone's hotspot). It also has a SD card slot in the dashboard unit.
For this of course you have to activate play store with your google ID and it will upgrade a number of apps, including the play store itself) .. so make sure you have a good amount of spare data available or park the car in range of your home broadband wifi if possible.
Bluetooth shows you two hotspots - Sync on which it might still broadcast and even pair with your phone, but don't use that, and SVU-Android, which works great with a default PIN of 0000 that you can change from the control panel. In short - choose SVU-Android and "forget this device" for the SYNC hotspot.
What I like about the stereo -
The deck has acceptable performance and very decent sound quality. There are a wide variety of sound mixer settings (Rock, Concert etc) available. It also has DVD and DVR, the old deck just had a CD drive.
This is not a device for totally serious audiophiles but it does have options to control the position of the driver (left or right) so that the sound is directed appropriately.
I have played a variety of music - hard rock (Metallica, AC/DC, Deep Purple), Jazz / Blues / Soul (Sinatra, Miles Davis, James Brown) and Carnatic (Chembai, Abhishek Raghuram etc) more or less non stop on my travel over the weekend to Bangalore and back from Chennai and they all sound very nice indeed on this deck.
The deck has a certain amount of internal storage too on which they have loaded three English songs (a very nice Carpenters song and a couple of others).
Now the (minor) niggles -
This stereo has a very respectable performance as it is, but it could do with a few extra CPU cores and has a limited amount of memory.
Don't sync your phone contacts if you have hundreds of numbers!!!
I can't say this strongly enough, please don't try to sync 700+ contacts there like I did. I had to restore them to my Google account from a backup set of contacts I maintain on my iCloud, after the Android threw an alert "too many contacts - delete, keep" etc - I foolishly chose delete. Afterwards I just chose to stop the device from syncing my contacts, things feel much better now.
Pairing my iPhone 7 is a bit dodgy with the Bluetooth occasionally emitting a hissing noise during calls, skipping a second or so in the middle of playing a track, or briefly disconnecting sometimes. A fix is that I didn't sync my contacts and refrained from pushing too much over Bluetooth. For example, Google Maps on my phone giving directions ++ the music was causing skipping so I installed the maps app on the deck instead from the app store. Once I did that, it felt much better with call quality coming through clear as well.
Along with your phone's ringtone, the device also has a very loud "old style telephone" type ringtone that kicks in when your phone rings. I need to find out how to turn that off, once I get a few minutes to spare with that deck.
The default volume out of the box is set at deafening levels (26 or so) - or maybe this was because of the guy who installed the deck. The sound quality is quite audible and clear even at 6-10. Turning it up to 20+ when playing heavy metal is a fun experience of course.
Pairing works much better when I pair an Android phone instead. (confirmed by the seller that the device has occasional issues when paired with iPhone 7).
Photos below.