Thinkcar THINKSCAN Max 2 OBD-II Diagnostic Tool Review

As you can see, Thinkcar THINKSCAN Max 2 is a fully functional scan tool with all the features that you might need to do detailed diagnostics on your vehicle, and the nice thing is that it has free lifetime updates on everything that we see here, so when we do the actual diagnostics, all of those are still updated for free for the life of the unit. The only option that you have to pay for after the initial term, I think you get a year to use all of these features of the actual ECU codes.

You know, so you can code the injectors and that kind of thing, and after a year, you have to buy a license, and from what I can see here, it looks like a license for about $50 for the vehicle brand. So, if you happen to be a DIYer and have a couple of different cars in your family, it can get a little bit expensive. I'm sure they offer deals because they seem to have been offering promotional prices for the Thinkdiag 2, so I would expect them to do the same thing with these things.

But one thing to keep in mind is that when you get this unit, there is a hidden cost for these maintenance and service features after a year, and as far as tablets go, it seems to be a pretty sturdy unit and I've seen some other devices on the market of particular designs, so I think it's a tested device.

Battery life seems to be pretty good, so I've had it on for about four or five hours and we're only down to 81, so that's pretty good. We do have some options here, so we have Wi-Fi for all the updates and connectivity to the internet, if you want to look at Chrome to do some diagnostics, we can do screen capture videos and pictures, we can change the orientation of the screen, obviously we have got things like screen brightness and volume, but it's fairly simple to tab, but it's deliberately locked.

So, it's only designed to be used with Thinkscan Max 2 software, so a really decent unit here for serious DIYer, but also for commercial use it just lacks some of the features compared to more expensive machines.

First of all, we have a limited screen size, it's a pretty small tablet, another limitation I found is that when you stream live data, you're only allowed to plot four streams of data, even though you can view more than four at a time on the screen, when you plot it, you're limited to four, I think some of the more expensive machines allow you to plot more than four. But that shouldn't be a limitation for most diagnostics.