2006 JBL / Nav with Vais MML ?

I've swapped five or six emails with Eugene at VAIS (I'm considering their Bluetooth audio SL3B), and he's been pretty responsive to my questions so far. The time difference might make it tough on you, but I hope you get the same experience I'm having.

Anyway, have you found more than one set of compatibility listings somewhere on their site? If so, do you have a link? When I saw found this PDF (bit.ly/1eWDwe0 — sorry, still too n00b to post links) from them, I assumed I didn't have to worry about compatibility on the Prius side. It's my phone I'm worried about.

 

A four-day wait is no good — and nothing like the response I was seeing. (Fwiw, I was emailing to info-at-vaistech-dott-com, in case you had a different address.) (Really? I can't even post email addresses in this forum yet? Wow, you guys are STRICT.)

I installed VAIS's SL3B yesterday (their Bluetooth audio gizmo), so I haven't spent much time with it, but from what I've seen so far it plays along with factory navigation just fine. It wasn't cheap, obviously, but my only other complaint so far was that I had to take the entire dashboard of my 2005 apart from the driver's side door all the way to the center to get to the back of the factory radio. I really can't count that as a strike against VAIS, tho'. But the sound I'm getting is more than good enough for me, and I've got no visible wires to deal with — which is what I wanted. (I threaded the cable through to the lower glove compartment and just slipped the SL3B in there, for now. It fit perfectly in the little slot in the back of the box.)

I'm hoping I can find a way to get it to stop playing a playlist as soon as I hit the DISC key on the radio, tho', since I mostly use it to listen to iTunes Radio or Stitcher. The instructions for using a third-party app (Stitcher, for example) say to hit the DISC button on the radio, wait for the SL3B to start playing a playlist, then launch the app you really want to listen to. That feels less than optimal; I'm hoping there's a setting somewhere I can tweak.

 

When I was done and everything was put back together, I could easily understand why folks would be willing to spend Best Buy or someone to do the install. It's definitely a job you could do yourself, but I was genuinely afraid I'd snap some piece of dashboard trim in half, or drop a screw down into the dash where it could happily rattle away for years. None of that happened in my case, but I could see where someone would pay for that peace of mind.

(Putting it in that pocket under the radio is a nifty idea, too. Is there an existing opening to fish a wire into that box? Maybe I should have considered that. The lower glove compartment seemed perfect in my case because there was just enough existing clearance to get the wire through the curved opening in the left edge of the box, and I didn't have to drill any holes — but I shouldn't really ever going to have to plug/unplug anything into/from it, either.)