Autoblog tests Smart's Cross Connect App in the 2016 Smart ForTwo for the 2016 Autoblog Technology of the Year award.
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STEVEN EWING: I'm Steven Ewing, managing editor for Autoblog. And we're up North in Petoskey, Michigan, testing our finalists for the 2016 Autoblog Technology of the Year Award. The technology I'll be looking at today is SYNC 3 in the 2016 Ford Escape.
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So this is the home screen for SYNC 3, where it's got a couple of basic pieces of information. You have the map for navigation. In this case, I have Bluetooth audio connected, so it has the name of the connection device and the song that I'm listening to. My phone is connected. And it has a very simple level of controls, right at the bottom, for all of your core functions.
So you can go into audio, everything is very clearly laid out. You actually adjust the sound or the tone through this sound button, right here. And it pulls up your treble, mid-range, bass, et cetera. You can go into Climate Control-- again, everything is really simple. Phone-- easy to pair a phone. Easy to use all the different things from inside of it. The one thing that I can sort of take away as I'm going through this though, is how quickly it responds now. Because that was a huge issue with the previous MyFord Touch system. It just was so slow all of the time.
My problem with this one though is MyFord Touch was kind of gorgeous. It looked really nice all the time. Everything was clearly laid out into these sort of four quadrants. Really nice colors-- it was very pretty. This system kind of reads to me like a large-print greeting card. Everything is, like, big and bold and, like, very obvious. But it's not visually interesting.
The other problem is this skin doesn't match what's in the instrument panel. So you have this clash of colors and fonts together. And it just doesn't look cohesive. I think the functionality is there, and it's a really nice system to use, It's just not really great to look at anymore. So that's my quick-take with Ford's new SYNC 3 system. From Autoblog, I'm Steven Ewing.
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