Greg Rice - Carpuride 702BS Pro Review

Testing / Review Of Carpuride 702BS Pro

I decided to go the CarPlay route and I purchased the Carpuride 702BS Pro 7 inch device.

During my ride to the End Of The Road I blew out my front facing camera on my iPhone 14 pro, unfortunatly this is a common issue with iPhones on motorcycles. I was still able to use my selfi camera and take photos during the ride. This happened to me a little over 2 years ago also. When I called Apple one of the questions they asked me was the phone on a motorcycle. So I had to get a new iPhone and I did not want the same thing to happen again so I decided to go the CarPlay device route and not mount my phone on the handlebar.

I have been using large Garmin GPS’s ( Dezl 770 & RV 890 ) for the past 13 years and really liked them as they were large easy to read and you could display the highway milemarker. They were not waterproof but I was able to make them water resistant. On my ride back home form the End Of The Road we encountered a lot of heavy rain in Guatemala that took out one of the audio channels on my RV 890 so I decided to replace it since it was 3 years old and had over 120,000 miles on it.

I did some research into what would be a good choice for a CarPlay device for my BMW GSA. I found there was 2 good options Carpuide and Chigee that had devices that worked with the BMW NAV6 cradle and the wonder wheel. I decided to purchase the Carpuride 702BS Pro and I was able to find a good discount and purchased it for $290 ( BIGROCKMOTO (-$125.97) ). The reasons I chose the Carpuride one is the 7 inch screen, mounts in the BMW NAV 6 cradle so it was a easy installation and works with the BMW GSA wonder wheel. Chigee may be a better device but it was only a 5 inch display which is a little smaller than I wanted and it cost $150 more, they do have a 6 inch display coming out in the summer but I don’t like to wait.

Some good features of the Carpuride 702BS Pro that I like is it is glove friendly, built in sun visor, big 7 inch display, light sensor so it auto dims when there is low light and the plug-n-play with the BMW cradle.

So I will been doing some testing on the Carpuride 702BS Pro for the next couple months and see if it can stand up to hard LD riding.

I don't think I will take much advantage of the Carpuride 702BS integration with the GSA's wonder wheel since I keep my TFT screen on the screen that display the TPMS and other information that is important to me so I do not need to switch to that information screen on the Carpuride device. When I had a Nav 6 GPS I never really used the wonder wheel to control the Nav 6 either. I pretty much always used the touch screen to control the GPS.

One of the things I found after installing the Carpuride 702BS in the BMW nav cradle was that I realized that the reach to the touch screen was pretty far and I like to run Waze and with all of the notifications from Waze I found it hard to respond to those notifications because I have devices on both handlebars and a tank bag that made the reach to the Carpuride device a little difficult. So I decided to remove the BMW nav cradle from the bar above the TFT screen and add a one inch ram ball to the bar. I then added a one inch ram ball to the back of the BMW nav cradle so this way I could use a six inch ram arm to mount the BMW nav cradle closer to me and much easier to reach. I still use the BMW nav cradle to mount the Carpuride device in to take advantage of the power in the cradle to power the Carpuride device. I did have to reroute the wire to the BMW nav cradle so it would reach since I moved the cradle off of the bar above the TFT screen. I also always add a safety tether to all of my devices and sometimes I use a GoPro tether which is what I did for the Carpuride. You can see the photos below how I did it.

Carpuride added over the air ( OTA ) firmware updates after I had purchased mine so I reached out to them to see if I could upgrade my Carpuride 702BS and they said yes and after confirming which device I had and what was the current firmware they sent me a I updated my Carpuride 702BS yesterday to add over the air ( OTA ) software updates, it was pretty easy once I did a little searching the internet because the instructions were not to detailed. Once I finished the firmware update to add OTA I found there was a couple updates available so I updated to the latest firmware. Some photos taken during the firmware update are below also showing where the micro sd card is inserted in the Carpuride.

Now that I have the Carpuride 702BS mounted closer to me it feels more like having my phone and is much easier to use. The Carpuride 702BS works as advertised and is / has been waterproof. It is a nice easy to read screen and glove friendly. Before moving the Carpuride closer to me I tried using some stencils that were made for the type of screen the Carpuride has but they did not work consistently. So another benefit in moving the Carpuride closer to me is that I can easily reach it with my hand.