Gadgetory

what's up guys this is Antoine Goodwin with cnet.com and I'm behind the wheel of the 2013 BMW x1 xdrive28i now that's a mouthful but I'm not here to talk about the engine or actually the rest of the car what I want to talk about today is the infotainment system and specifically the radio preset buttons now before you go rolling your eyes about presets I know they've been around for about as long as radios have the preset buttons in this vehicle have some pretty interesting functions that I'd like to show you today now for purposes of today's demonstration most of what will be happening will be visible on the screen but off screen I'll be touching these preset buttons down here they're interesting because they actually have sort of a hover over function that gives you the ability to just sort of touch them without actually depressing them and still have something register up on the screen it's gonna come in handy in just a second now back here on the screen you can see we've got the map up we've also got a split screen thing happening here showing us what audio source were listening to right now it happens to be a Sirius XM satellite radio station but if I just hover over the buttons like I said I would a second ago you can see at the top screen there's a top of screen of the status bar it shows up that shows you what preset is stored underneath that button so you don't have to go clicking around you can just kind of hover over find the preset that you're looking for hit that button and you're ready to go but it doesn't stop there if I just tap the media button here I can jump over to the hard drive that's actually stored inside of the BMW's dashboard and from this menu I can actually see a couple of playlists of rip CDs that I've got stored here now if I select this album for example and hold down a preset button I can store that playlist right there with the presets alongside my radio stations now from driving along and I want to hear this album I just tap the appropriate button and it starts playing but it doesn't stop there either now I've jumped over into the phone menu and I've selected a contact here Optimus Prime he's a really good friend of mine and if I want to I can again hold down a preset button and store that phone number under pre-set as well now if I'm driving along and decide I want to say something to the leader of the Autobots I just tap that button and the hands-free calling system automatically starts calling him it's a really cool way to not have to deal with a long list of contacts if you only really talked to a couple of people now I've jumped over into the navigation section again to search for a destination and we've got this kind of cool knob thing happening here but you don't want to fiddle around with that while you're driving so I've taken the liberty of selecting one of my favorite restaurants in the Bay Area and just like with the radio stations I can select a preset by hovering my finger over it and then holding down the button to save that destination into the preset button now just like with the radio presets and the music presets and the phone presets I can find that destination tap the button and automatically start routing to the destination the highlighted route now the beauty of this system is that pretty much anything you see on the screen and would navigate to normally using your voice commands or your rotary controller you can also use a preset for now if you're the kind of person that just really likes to spend a lot of time looking at the trip computer in your car you can actually pop back into the menu select the trip computer option let's save it to a preset now let's say for example you're driving around you just want to get a pretty quick idea of what's going on with your fuel economy boom I'm Ashwin Goodwin witthe Netcom and I've been sitting behind the wheel of the 2013 BMW x1 xdrive28i showing you how the radio preset buttons work