Gadgetory

I'm here in the 2016 Ford Escape taking an in-depth look at the new sync 3 infotainment system this system replaces the old MyFord Touch system it was pretty sluggish the system is a lot better first let's look at the layout on this home screen here I'm looking at navigation on the Left audio on the upper right and the phone system on the lower right I also have a persistent menu bar across the bottom this shows me audio climate the phone system navigation the apps link menu and a settings venue one complaint I have here has to do with this Hardware right here which kind of gets in the way of reaching this menu I which four would lower this down a bit make that menu a little more accessible now let me show you one of the really cool things about this system here I'll go to navigation and this is incredibly responsive I can show this on the map I just like dragging it around it just drags around so quickly I mean this is faster than you see on most tablets as fast as any smartphone and that responsiveness relays it to the entire system here everything just works really quickly and that's fantastic here now for the navigation system here I'm looking at 3d rendered maps these maps look really good in this navigation system they're really light and clean and we're looking at 3d rendered buildings in downtown San Francisco I can zoom out of course I can also pinch and zoom too which is nice and I can look at different types of maps I can look at plan view maps if I prefer a top-down let's go to destination here is pushing this button and I get a previous destinations some categories for POS places of interests I also have a save location for home and work and favorites but when I want to enter an address manually I just push the search button here I've got what Ford calls its one box search idea so I can start entering any letters in here and this will search against not only street names but also places of interest so I put in CBS do you search not only find CBS interactive where we are right now it also finds a place called CBS Lane which is far far away and I can enter in full addresses here if I know my specific street address 2:35 second Street comes up right away and that gives us our location right here so it's really fast entering addresses here I should point out there's no online destination search in this menu that's because there's no dedicated data connection in this car but Ford makes up for that with their appling system right now there are no online search apps yet but there could be in the future right now I'm looking at serious travel link and that gives me traffic information fuel prices movie times a lot of the stuff you get through satellite radio in a lot of current cards today also perhaps I've got some apps that are running on my phone right now I've got glimpse which lets me share my current location and where I'm going and Spotify all these are running on my iPhone here which is cabled to the car there are other apps available and more gonna be added pretty much every month when I go in as Spotify I get this really clean looking screen and this is a fairly common screen amongst the audio apps that are available here so you don't have to change what you're looking at every time you bring up a different audio app or audio source so I get my skip play pause buttons those are great that's not this menu button up here so I can choose a lot of different options that Spotify gives me I can browse different artists I can choose my favorite artists I can look at some of the local radio stations I have saved here and it's really easy to go through them and choose which ones I want now let's go into the audio menu because there's a lot of other options here so if I hit my change source I can see I've got am/fm fhd FM as well Sirius satellite radio CD Bluetooth audio and plus since I have my iPhone connected system I can also view music that's stored on my phone so I hit the Browse button here and I get this menu of playlists artists albums genres songs all the usual things you find in a music library interface if I switch to bluetooth streaming one thing you don't get here is the ability to browse your music library on your phone some more advanced systems do that today but this one doesn't now let's go to the phone menu and here I get my recent call list contacts dialer and I also get access to Siri too so I can request stuff from my iPhone obviously that's not gonna work with an Android and of course I've got voice command here so a lot of the things I can do on the screen I can do just by seeing this voice command but this new sync free system is really good and it's actually a lot better than a lot of the systems you see in cars today because it is so responsive and it does have that app link connectivity that's going to allow a lot of expansion in the future