I've had the Asteroid Smart in my car for a few days now. I have to say, I'm very impressed and pleased with the whole package.

For offline music, I have an old 160GB iPod Classic hooked up in the glove box. The Asteroid Smart has no problems properly grouping artists, albums, tracks, etc. The album art doesn't have any issues showing either. If you're playing music from and iPod or other USB device, the notification shade has reverse, play/pause, and forward buttons for control without having to go back to the iPod app. This is the best offline music experience I've had in a car since the empeg.

For online music, most Android apps will work. However, without Google Play support, you will have to sideload the APKs. Natively, through the Asteroid Market, you can download TuneIn Radio and Spotify. I have Pandora installed through sideloading, and it seems to work perfectly.

I've also sideloaded Yelp and Foursquare so you can find places to go while driving. I haven't had a need to do that yet, but I imagine it will come in handy.

The Asteroid Smart comes with iGO Navigation and offline maps on an SD card for your region. To be perfectly honest, I ran that application once just to make sure I had the proper North American mapset. This device is all about Google Maps Navigation (sideloaded). It runs superbly on this thing. If Parrot were able to sell this with Google Maps installed and running, they would be flying off shelves.

As for mobile data, I'm tethering over bluetooth to my phone. So far, this has been working solidly. The Asteroid Smart also has Wifi built-in and can work with many 3G/4G USB dongles.

The only failures I've run into so far have been core Google apps. I can't get GMail, Talk, and Youtube to install. I know it's probably because I'm missing background Google framework packages, but I can't get them to install either. Until someone roots it, that's just the way it's going to be.

I also ran into an issue with the current version of Pandora hanging at the splash screen. I simply installed a version from late 2012 and it has been working great since.

Prior to preordering the Asteroid Smart, I was looking at some of the Chinese double-din units from Ca-Fi. Then I attempted fashioning a bracket to put a Nexus 7 in the dash. Now, I have no doubt that the Asteroid was the best way to go. It's less expensive than Ca-Fi, and it's a lot more finished looking than a Nexus 7.

Things I would change:

• Put a knob or volume rocker on the face. Having to press a speaker softkey, then use an on-screen slider sucks. I'm working on the steering wheel control interface, so that will help me with that issue. But, lots of people don't have an option to do that.
• Get Google's support so we can have the Play Store and core Google applications. It's not a big deal to work around this, but it would be a huge plus.