Gadgetory

well for the 2012 model year Twitter took out a stick and beat the camera within an inch of its life to make it a hipper car with some cooler technology including M tune let's drive the 2012 XLE v6 with the Entune head unit and check all the tech but this being an xle we've got the high tone trim you got this stitching and all these nice soft finishes let's just say the Camry looks a lot nicer when it's a nice one then it ever did before kind of a more grown-up luxurious look not that kind of doughy transportation appliance it long was but let's get to the real action here the head unit we've got the ultimate head unit here which is what they call their advanced navigation system and one of the things you'll see is that I can do a split screen and I've always liked Toyota and Lexus rendering the quality of the graphics to me this is one of the best screens in a car today beyond that it's a standard Toyota navigation system that we've seen many times and the interface is good very clear one thing about it though it's a touchscreen of course sometimes I found it was very hard to get these touch buttons to react sometimes they're light sometimes I got to mash them with my thumb I don't fits temperature-related or a different mode of the system but sometimes it can be a little bit of a pain our media options are many on this car because we've got it as a high trim car with the top-end head unit we have a USB plus iPod down in here there's also an auxilary jack there for your basic fallback AM FM HD radio with iTunes tagging Sirius XM satellite radio is standard as is a2dp bluetooth streaming the biggest innovation on this camry is it's the first car from Toyota to feature their new in tune system it's under the apps button that's been kind of grafted onto the old info button here and then you get this app selection on the screen and that takes you into five apps that come down through a single app on your smart phone I get Bing for search and the results are very simplified and they're really kind of oriented toward navigation i heart radio streaming Clear Channel Radio stations live stations around the country movie tickets calm look up movies and buy tickets live open table for restaurant reservations of course pandora is pretty common in cars these days now see our separate video on the end to insistence you really get some detail on this but I'll say in general this is the best basket of apps in a car so far I like the fact that you installed just one app on your phone it pulls these down from the cloud and the way they've optimized everything for the car looks and works well downsides are too much is locked out when the car is driving and even then too many of these apps don't respond to voice command so they kind of go off in a wasteland unless the car is still Toyota's got to figure out their game on that front a couple things to note on this car it is trying to be very green then of course that's not a hybrid or anything like that and there's no auto start/stop technology but you do have something I've never seen before that needle is an average mpg gauge not a readout digitally but that needle actually moves around and hovers and monitors your historic mpg it's interesting way of showing it and right around it you've got those green segment bars those show your instantaneous economy as you're driving and finally the eco light tells you when you're driving as economically as the engine is capable of one choice on the gearbox a six-speed automatic that has a sport gate now everybody has to do these days no paddles on the wheel though unless you get the SE model now pretty garden-variety stuff in this Camry it's a carryover three and a half liter v6 good motor get you 268 horsepower 248 foot-pounds of torque while getting this roughly 3,300 pound car up to 16 around six and a half seconds your mileage is 2130 EPA rated it's gonna give you around twenty four then as an average this car is also available as a four-cylinder with more like 178 horsepower as I recall and also the hybrid carries over we'll review that one separately all Camrys are transverse front-wheel drive does no all-wheel drive going on here and no more manual transmission on any of the power trains now you know me I care much less about how much power a car has then how available the power is that a car has and this is in the high camp for availability great responsiveness under the throttle you step on it and the car goes faster a lot of cars don't do that this one's very responsive that way the blind spot tech is well calibrated it picks up cars up to about midship here all the way back through what I would consider a blind spot so it's well arranged in that respect it doesn't get in the way of anything though all it does is tell you with a solid yellow someone's there or with a blinking yellow if someone's there and you've turned signaled into that lane and here's the great sort of unsung headline on this car the handling is good not sporty good but responsive good it goes along with that engines right now power availability makes for a very cohesive package this is the kind of car you will enjoy driving in almost all modes it never feels laborious or like you're on a boat you got to kind of lean the opposite way to keep it from capsizing okay bottom line on the Camry this car is gonna come in in this trim somewhere in the mid 30 thousands and for what you're getting and the quality of materials the improved handling the little better mpg and the Entune technology it's a good value on the other hand it still remains a very middle-of-the-road car not totally polished on the tech and to needs another rev and nor is it become a car that has any real driver aspirations but that isn't the idea and they'll sell these things all day long