Music on the Road: Ford and Microsoft Show Their Sync

Yesterday, I saw a demo of Ford and Microsoft's new Sync system for connecting and controlling music devices and mobile phones through your car, using USB and Bluetooth technology.

The product was announced at CES  and Bill Howard wrote about the system for pcmag.com afterwards, but this was the first time I had a chance to see it in person, and I came away quite impressed. What stood out the most was the relative simplicity of the interface and the quality of voice recognition.

The first demo I saw was in a Ford Edge SUV which had a large display designed for a navigation system (pictured). Demos I saw showed various music devices plugged in via USB (in a compartment in the arm rest), including an iPod, iPhone, Zune, and just a plain old USB memory key with music on it. The Sync system picked up the songs, and voice recognition let you choose the band or song to play by just speaking the name. I said "Play Counting Crows" and it worked.

The system also works with any phone that has a bluetooth connection, letting you stream music from the phone, although in that case, you don't have voice control over what is playing. But you can use voice control to place and answer calls, with the system reading the address book from the phone -- a very useful feature. Also, I was impressed by how well the system could read incoming text messages (including smileys and other text abbreviations), and let you respond with a small but useful list of preprogrammed replies.

All of this shows up very nicely on the screen. It also seems to work well as an integrated whole, with the music fading down when a call comes in, etc. However, I was disappointed that while it shared the screen with the navigation system, it wasn't particularly integrated with the directions. So if you are playing music, it isn't interrupted by driving instructions.

I also saw another version, in a Ford Focus, that just had a small text display, but it offered pretty much the same features; and an in-between version in a Lincoln. It's great to see this kind of feature offered on a large range of cars, not just the high end. Ford plans on offering the system on a dozen models this fall. It's not inexpensive -- it's a $395 option on most models-- but it is less than most similar systems I've seen.

Source: http://blog.pcmag.com/blogs/miller/archive/2007/08/29/2083.aspx