Gadgetory

one on in car sort of telematics and interface and even connectivity would sync and MyFord Touch came along with the most ambitious upgrade to that but it tripped over itself in a couple of ways a little too much going on on the screen and things weren't responding fast enough and they heard about it here's their response they've significantly overhauled my Ford touch which is the interface you see and the way that it responds first of all they've done a better job of making the homescreen very clear you've got these four regions that are now much more persistently visible when you press a button things happen faster you don't see that anywhere more than if you're watching the navigation screen do its thing where things are happening smoothly now because they've done much more with hardware acceleration letting the graphics hardware take on all that rendering and freeing up the CPU to be responsive to you or your voice commands good move another important change for those of you that we're finding it was very slow to get this system booted after you started your car is they now suspend everything the system state and the navigation also gets frozen in memory and basically ready for an instant reboot they weren't doing that in the past they were cold booting NAV every time you started the car and that was holding a lot of other things back one of my favorite improvements is what they've done on the main screen wherever you go you're gonna find a much cleaner set of buttons and labels remember these are on the left they used to kind of overwrite each other you'd have serious on top of its logo you might have some frequencies or megahertz alongside the radio presets it was kind of a hot mess now things have been cleaned up and these button stacks on the left and the right are much more consistent across all the levels of information and function on this system small thing but they had to hear about this too the clocks bigger the digits were too small in the past a lot of folks said do I have a clock in this car one last touch they've added these sort of virtual LEDs to many buttons that have let's say multiple pages to each choice like on FM you've got several sets of presets there was no way to sort of see which one you were on until they surfaced these little virtual LEDs and they do these on many buttons around the system that have rotating pages underneath them all these small things and from what I can tell in this quick test of their increased hardware acceleration on graphics seems to have brought this system into the kind of snappy performance I always wanted it to have this would be coming out first on the escape the flex and the Taurus in early 2012 as new 2013 models and as all the 2013's roll out from Ford they will have this spread across them the other good news for those of you who have a my Ford touch equipped car for the last year and a half from when it first debuted they're gonna mail you a thumb drive that you stick in the USB port that will do this field upgrade so all the my Ford touch cars are gonna get to this level bring everybody forward