Gadgetory

hi I'm Wayne Cunningham here at CES 2014 and Audi's booth looking at the Audi smart display now this is an Android tablet that Audi launched here at the show it's got a nice aluminum case it's supposed to be fairly durable for the automotive environment it actually integrates with the car it's not just a tablet on its own so it's connecting to the car through Wi-Fi I've had a little demonstration of the cars that infotainment Center here so your passengers can sit with this tablet and say they can pull up the map I can pull up navigation maybe do a search for something for you if you don't want to do a search on your own or you're busy driving do a free-form search we'll just throw an Audi on here and so we get a list of locations that show up here now I can just drag one of these over if I pull up navigation here it'll automatically load whatever destination I put from here onto the cars and navigation so your passenger can do all the navigating for you likewise your passenger can also be your DJ and also we have a nice little car screen here let's actually show the cars speed and other information that's actually coming from the car into the tablet you can't really do that with any other Android tablet only the one that's really connected integrated to the car like this one is but also the cool thing is we can also go to standard Android functionality we got our apps right here we got our whole screen full of apps so gonna have any Android app loaded onto here so your your passengers can use this and this tablets can be connected to the car as a Wi-Fi hotspot has a 4G connection out to the Internet and so they can just do anything they want on here watch movies or whatever while you drive so now let's go over here to this Audi TT virtual cockpit out he brought the interior of its upcoming out e TT model now the TT is gonna be really exciting when it comes out later this year we haven't seen that car yet but we are seeing the cockpit we're seeing a whole new infotainment system they've really updated their multi media interface with this fully new system they call it the virtual cockpit so what we have is a fully LCD instrument cluster here so of course we have our gauges in the like and we can look at our speed and our tachometer and stuff like that but then if we want to look at the infotainment functions I can push this button and I get my functions for radio media telephone and navigation we'll take a look at navigation first so I also have a new controller over here Hardware controller and they've simplified this with these kind of toggle switches for your navigation map telephone and radio and media so I can also go quickly to navigation just by pushing one of these buttons here or I can use the menu here so I go to navigation and now I get a full-on map shown on the cells of the instrument cluster right in front of me that's extremely cool and if I want to find a destination and there's a touchpad on top of this dial so I can start tracing in letters this is kind of like the touchpad in other outies but it's a little more refined it's also on top of this dial to make it more compact I found a result here so I just pushed down here and it automatically throws it into navigation and sets up my route guidance now if I want to look at media sources I can just flip this button here on the side and now I can see my various media sources playing here if they also of course have telephone and same thing the same search function also works with your address book so I my phone paired to this car I can start tracing letters to find anybody in my address book and it'll bring up a list bring up the results I can play psychologist by pushing down on the central controller here it's a really cool system they've really streamlined this MMI interface this virtual cockpit takes what out he had before and makes it a lot easier to get around a lot easier to find thing the information flow is just so much better and it's gonna be really exciting when we get this car on the road I've been cutting hammock here at CES 2014