 Alright guys, so today I'm going to be reviewing this brand new wireless carplay and Android auto adapter. This is called the CarLux Pro Plus. If you may have seen one of my previous videos I reviewed the previous model, the CarLux wireless adapter. This is the latest edition. This comes with the Android 13 and Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset to make this a little bit more of a smoother and faster experience and it has an updated OS by CarLux themselves. So let's go ahead and set this up. Okay so the very first time that you do connect the CarLux Pro Plus, you take the USB cable, you plug it into your car's USB port, this will start flashing red and it will be detectable via the Bluetooth settings on your phone and this will also start loading up on your car screen for the very first time. So as it's now loading up for the very first time you should see the intro CarLux logo before it loads into the actual system. There you go CarLux Android 13 and you saw how quickly that loaded in. So one thing I wanted to mention is if you do have any problems setting this up and you just wanted to learn a little bit more or maybe follow a more in-depth user guide with some tutorials in the box you also get a little card giving you a little thank you message for purchasing it and there's two QR codes on here. This one at the front and there's another one for support at the back. This one at the front if we go ahead and scan this this will take you to the CarLux Store page where they have a lot of user guides and tutorials about how to use the CarLux Pro Plus. As you can see how to connect troubleshooting, connecting to the internet, screen mirroring and lots of different things that I've actually shown you in this video. So if you do struggle you can actually watch some of these if you click into it it opens up a YouTube video explaining everything on how to do that. So that's very convenient and with the other QR code at the back this gives you private dedicated support via WhatsApp. So when you scan this it will open your WhatsApp and then it will give you a WhatsApp phone number that you can add to contacts and then speak to the CarLux support team directly in case you are having a lot of problems. So very convenient that they've provided a lot of support and help for anyone that wants to get up and running with this little code. The speed and the response rate on this as you can see while I'm swiping and going between different apps I've actually used this for a couple of days. It's so much faster than the previous model and I can't really fault because if you take a look at the specs as on the screenshot you're seeing now this is a very good upgrade and you can see all of the things that have changed from the previous model allowing this to be super responsive, more fluid and much easier to use between the three operating systems that does come with this which is the CarLux OS itself as well as Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. So having those specs in a small adapter like this is going to make a big difference when you wanted to use the CarLux OS system on its own as a standalone and independent operating system for your car. And this also has the option to add in photos and videos that you can also display on the Android system on this via a TF card slot but if you have a data sim card then you can use your own wifi and internet by putting your sim card in a sim card slot as you can see here. So once you've done that and connected it to the USB slot for the first time it will light up in blue as you can see here in the design and as you can see you have three different widgets right there on the home screen of this custom OS and it looks pretty nice it's very easy to navigate you'll notice there's a floating menu button which comes up in various different situations when you open an app when you're navigating that's very convenient as well and I'll showcase how that works but just along the bottom you have a little dock you can add shortcuts to your favorite apps that you like to access very quickly but this does come with some pre-installed apps which I'm going to showcase now you've got the widgets there for Google Maps you've got it for your music and your contacts if you scroll to the right here's a whole bunch of apps as you would expect from a system like this very similar apps that you get on apple carplay and android auto but the main benefit of this is you'll be able to watch videos on youtube and netflix you can also have other apps like disney plus you have hbo max so if you wanted to download more apps on this it's very easy you have the google play store here you click on that and as you would with any google play store you just go in search for your app and install it directly onto the system here so let's go ahead for example and download amazon prime video of course make sure you are connected to wi-fi there you go very quick and easy if i go back to the home screen that will be added right to the end and as always you can add that as a shortcut and then you can go ahead log in and start watching your content using this pretty much every app on the google play store you can download and and although they may not be made specifically for car screens and internal systems like this for the majority of it if you download any navigation app or any content streaming app it should work absolutely fine one of the things that i really wanted to showcase to you is the benefits of having this so if you do want to maybe watch videos from youtube or from your favorite content streaming services then you can do it directly from this but not just that if you don't want to open up car play or android auto itself you can do everything from the car looks product here so if you want to navigate you can use google maps if you wanted to listen to music you can do that via spotify so you have all of the options that you would need so just as an example i'm going to go ahead and play a video on youtube but before you do that you have to make sure you're connected to the internet because i'm parked right next to my house i went into settings and i picked up the wi-fi via the network and internet options here from my home internet so everything is already connected to go back to the home if you hit that floating menu button you have the home option there you also have the option to see the background apps you can also do google voice assistant which is that middle one and you can actually split the screens as well if you have multiple apps open so that's quite a nice feature to have so let's hit home and it goes back to get rid of that floating menu all you need to do is just swipe behind it and that will automatically disappear and go back to floating so plenty of nice options to get up and running and i didn't really have any problems if you want to go back to your main car systems in built os then you have the option for return there one thing i also want to mention is that this product is mainly going to be for those people that want to have a wireless carplay or android auto experience or someone that just wants the additional benefits of being able to watch content like youtube and netflix if you already have wireless capabilities in your car this may not provide any other additional benefit specifically for android auto or carplay but also note that you need to have an active subscription or installation of carplay and android auto already installed in your car's default system if you don't have any activated version of it the adapter itself is not enough for you to just automatically get wireless carplay added to your car's entire system now let's go ahead and play some content just to show you know how good this looks so if you open up youtube i'll play one of my previous videos i've already logged in the keyboard is you know as standard these aren't native apps made specifically for car screens so that's just something to be aware of it's quite a long name but there's also a universal version which is this one here which is compatible with any other car so as you can see i'm playing one of my previous youtube videos of the original car looks adapter which i also did a review on and i can put a link to the description to that specific video it comes directly from the speakers in the car as well this is called the car lux pro and i'm going to set this up in my car by testing it out for a few days this has a little usb c port there to connect it to your usb port in your car and just on the other side one thing i really like about it is you can expand this with the micro sd card and go so one thing to also note is that this is exactly the same design as the previous one but the software behind it is actually what's mainly the difference and what has changed since the previous model so the video plays back quite nicely there's no lag there's no buffer and the audio is in sync with the video which is more than you can ask for i do get this question sometimes can you actually drive and have the video playing at the same time yes you can in the settings you can turn that off because you know that's quite a safety concern as well so i don't recommend to anyone to have videos playing whilst you're driving because it could be a distraction and you could get into an accident but if you just parked up somewhere and you just want to watch some content while you may be waiting for someone then this is perfect to do that so let's go back and let's do a split screen actually so you can see split screen i can choose maybe the settings along the youtube and you can see it split like that you have the option to close the split by swiping right and it goes back full screen to which way you swipe so i think that's quite nice let's go back home so just as another example i'll open up netflix and also just remember these aren't native apps to the car itself so we'll go ahead and play an episode of foobar and you can see how clear that is and this is pretty much full screen which the previous car lux adapter didn't do so i really liked that it is utilizing most of the space now compared to what it was before so that is a very great upgrade so you can watch everything and of course like i mentioned you press the floating menu button to get out quickly and you can go back home but if the video is still playing it does add that as a picture in picture just on the bottom corner if you do want to go back to it you can just tap it and go to full screen and then you can continue watching let me just show you the background apps there you have a delete button just at the bottom to remove all the background apps and there you go everything is back there so i like adding a quick set of shortcuts as well to go to those apps that i would utilize the most you have files as well so if you do add a tf micro sd card maybe with some videos and pictures you can view it perfectly fine on there as well directly from there now the one thing i also like it has google assistant so you can actually do voice commands and this actually works with the voice command button that's on my steering wheel you have the option to access it from the floating menu but you also have the dedicated app there and i'm also going to add that as a shortcut because i really like this feature so once you do press it you can give it a command maybe to open a certain app let's try it open youtube opening youtube how quick and easy was that it works very very well so if we come out go back home i just wanted to mention that if you do have a voice command button on your steering wheel for example you can see just on the right hand side of your screen the bottom right icon there on this left panel is a voice command if i just press it once it goes to my land rover voice command system but if i hold it down it will access google voice assistant from the carlux os which i think is a really great thing so let's try something else i'll hold this down open netflix opening netflix so now i have access to open anything i'd like using the button on my steering wheel which i think is going to be a great advantage for a lot of users that would want something like this so that's pretty much everything that i wanted to showcase with the carlux os itself it's very nice you have all of the apps that you would need you have access back to your widgets all in one place and your apps like this with the button on the bottom left so now if we go back if you wanted to access carplay or android auto itself then you have to use the option called zlink 5 here so you press this and you can choose between carplay and android auto you need to connect it to your bluetooth via your phone like i already have and as you see it opened up very quickly and you have access to apple carplay as you would expect so i'm not going to go through the carplay system itself because you guys are aware of how that works but the one thing i would mention is that now that i've set it up with carlux adapter it's at its own little icon here called car that will take you back to the carlux os so once you press this you can go back one step and very quickly you're back into this system from here if you want to go back to your manufacturer os then you can also go and hit that return icon which i've added to shortcuts bar down here and there you go i'm now back to the main system so that's kind of like the layered steps of accessing all of those three different systems which i think is absolutely great so you've got your own manufacturer system you go into carplay which will load up carlux and then from carlux you type that zlink 5 and that will go into carplay or android auto okay so now let's talk about screen mirroring which is another great option to screen mirror you first have to disconnect from carplay from your phone as well so where it says zlink i will go into the settings there and i will choose forget this car the reason you have to do this is because when you use the zlink option here in the carlux system it gives you the option to connect to apple carplay or android auto and if you have that bluetooth connection already it will load it up by itself automatically so you can't get to the screen mirroring option itself so the next step you need to make sure is that you are connected to the same wi-fi as your phone and as carlux is so if you're near your house and you parked right in front you may be connected to your home wi-fi but if you're outdoors then is recommended to connect to your phone's personal hotspot so you have data on your phone and then you connect to that same phone hotspot on the settings there once you're both on the same connection you go to zlink 5 as you would do when you're going to carplay then you hit the wireless screen mirroring option here you can see that pops up if you don't see this screen then you may see a wireless mirroring option just on the bottom left if it goes default to the wired mirroring option but then it comes to this screen there so you can choose between iphone and android so i have an iphone i'm going to select that and it just gives you those easy steps like you do with airplay as you would with any iphone so then you go into your phone screen mirroring and there's an option there right at the bottom called zj airplay you select this and there you see in the background it's now mirroring so you can see actually there's about a one and a half second lag there but overall it's pretty good if we go and open up let's say the carlux pro website you can see it's working very well this will be great you know if you wanted to maybe showcase videos from your phone or even some photos it will just work absolutely fine so if we go into how to connect open up a youtube video go in there full screen there we go and the audio will come directly from the speakers in the car as well and if you go to full screen you can see the video will also rotate in landscape mode and you get to see the full screen version like this as you would with any other video whilst watching it natively on your car screen so the mirroring as you can see is working very well i quite like it and it's just very quick and easy to set up it's no issues whatsoever and that's pretty much everything it works very well i can control my music via Spotify from the carlux system with the controls on my steering wheel i can use google maps i can do everything i need to from this system itself without accessing carplay on its own but the main benefit of this is that i don't need to worry about having my phone connected to a usb cable to load up carplay i can just have it wireless as soon as i step in the car then it works perfectly fine however one thing i would say is that when i do then go and connect my phone via a usb cable just to charge it while i'm running carlux adapter i did notice that the system got a little bit confused that there's now two connections to carplay one via the wire and one via this usb adapter and what happened was when i was listening to music on Spotify the audio disappeared so i wasn't able to get any audio come from my music and it doesn't matter if i switch tracks or anything the audio wouldn't come out so once i disconnected my phone from the usb cable and the only thing connected via carplay was the carlux adapter then the audio came back not sure where the bug or the misconnection is there and maybe it's picking up that there's two connections to carplay and that was just something i've noticed with Spotify on its own not necessarily with the navigation because that would continue to work that's something just to be aware of but you can technically just charge your phone at the same time but if you use that same charger to load up carplay then you might get that conflict with the music which i've just noticed but everything else all in all i think this is great take a look at the link in the description if you want to check out more information about this and get the latest pricing information on this it's the carlux pro plus and i think they've done a really good job especially now that it has the qualcomm snapdragon chipset in it to make it a little bit more fluid a little bit faster i think it just works fine make sure you like this video if you did enjoy the review on this and if you find it beneficial for you and your car make sure to subscribe i have plenty of cool tech gadgets coming out in the near future much like this and i will catch you guys at the next one take care