try to buy an HD radio on amazon and they'll sell you an AM/FM radio that doesn't even have RDS but does have an HD (meaning 600 pixels tall) screen

Go on Crutchfield who actually know what HD radio is; that'll be four hundred dollars please and thank you, and no you can't have buttons or a volume knob

this is all because I tried to have steering wheel controls For Safety and they didn't work with my Kenwood and my choices are spend sixty bucks on a box to make two wires talk to one wire, spend four hundred bucks on a fancypants radio that's fancypants enough to listen to two wires, or spend sixty bucks on a How Bad Could It Be android radio

So I've got an android radio coming

I learned early on that there's no point at all buying expensive car stereos

Spent two hundred quid on a Clarion CD player and soon replaced it with the twenty quid one out of Aldi that could play MP3 CD-R, CD-RW, CD+R, CD+RW and probably slices of toast if you asked it nice, just how like the cheap DVD players didn't care about regions or copied discs, they were cheap because they Didn't Give A Fuck

I'm trying the sixty buck android head unit aye, I did try and return the fifty buck one last year because it didn't do RDS and made my speakers go THONK every time I turned it on, but I like a gamble

Update, the android radio did arrive, it was sixty bucks, it came with all the wires, a backup camera, TWO infrared remote controls (one normal one and one shaped like strap-to-your-steering-wheel in case your car's so old it doesn't have volume controls on the wheel (like mine)) and it's Fine

It advertised itself as having RDS, it has VERY RUDIMENTARY RDS, meaning it'll sometimes show the name of the station but not the title or artist.

It can talk to my aftermarket bolted-on steering wheel controls OK, and does volume and calls and mode switch and seek but weirdly NOT pause/play.

It's not actually an android radio as in a wee android computer with an amp and a shite radio chip, it's actually the new thing where this is a pretty basic not-android computer but you plug your phone in and all the crap on your phone comes up on the radio screen, which I guess does mean I don't have to download podcasts to two machines. It says it can do it wirelessly but I haven't figured that out yet.

It sounds... fine. I had a Kenwood in before, the Kenwood probably would've sounded audibly better than this if it were plugged into speakers that weren't set into steel and aimed at my ankles, but it's in a car ffs, you can spend two grand on a sound system in your car and it'll never sound better than a tenth of that spent in your house. It sounds the same as the Kenwood.

I wish the radio were a bit better but honestly, like... for sixty bucks, it's really, really hard to grumble.

I might stick one in the old car I'm trying to sell, and add $500 to the price.