Before you buy this, ask yourself, “why haven’t I ever seen this being used by the big time heavy hitters in the overland and offroad community”? The answer is simple. It’s flawed beyond belief and 100% of that rests solely on the android touch screen that controls it.
At its base it’s a cheap android phone with a LINX app on it. You are going to experience severe lagging, constant freezing up and at its worst, shutting down over and over again rendering your lockers, lights, fridge, compressor and whatever else you allow it to control useless.
I decided to go with this because I liked how it controlled everything and with so much of my set up being ARB, it seemed like a no brainer to allow an ARB product to control ARB products. Well here’s how it works. The brains is basically flawless, and will never fail but you have to do a ton of wiring to get it all centralized and cleaned up. The touch screen mounts on your dash and will last right about 2.75 years if you’re lucky. Then you call and jump through hoops to get a new one under warranty. Remember, save your receipts, you are going to need them! You get the brand spank’n new system in and get it hooked up. Yay, problem solved.
Through the years you’ll update it about 100 times and with every update the touch screen phone just seems to get more and more buggy. Finally it’s going to do the exact same thing it did before and ultimately render your thousands of dollars in equipment into paper weights.
No big deal right, this thing is with in their 3 year warranty as advertised on their hold music when you call them, ARB is all about standing by their reliable and well built products. Wellllllll, the warranty starts at the original time of purchase, not the ship date of the new warranty claim product they sent you. So even though that product is with in 3 years, they look at it as 5.75 years old even though that original product is in a box somewhere in the basement.
You’ll deal with a pretty nice tech guy but eventually ask to speak with a supervisor who will explain all this to you, belittle you, tell you you’re wrong and the only guy above him is the VP of ARB. At some point he will ask you, “So you’re just going to call in a new warranty claim every 3 years so we can ship you a new product for the rest of your life”. To which you’ll respond, “well no, that wouldn’t happen if you made a product that wasn’t designed to fail at its warranty deadline”. He will even admit that electronic products just don’t last, and despite you explaining your case, tell you he is ending the call. If ARB made the LINX as well built as their lockers or compressor, the LINX would last almost a life time, but using fine print and legal jargon, you’re going to be stuck with a system that doesn’t work.
Take your $630 something dollars and the immense amount of time to wire it up properly, and go buy a redarc or a SPOD. This thing is pretty cool until it’s not and then you are totally screwed because ARB will not stand behind this product.
