Gadgetory

this 2012 Camry is the first car from Toyota to feature their new Entune system this is one of the most ambitious of the in-car app platforms the way it works if you install the Entune app a master app if you will on your smartphone Android iPhone I believe blackberry as well and all you see there is the Entune screen that low means you are connected and then from the cloud this car pulls through your phone five popular apps you've got bang which of course as Microsoft search engine notice that when I get a result it's going to be oriented toward navigation and very simplified so I can go to it if I want to and while Bing does have voice command that little icon on the top of the screen I find that it's about half as good as what I've got on my Android phone now Google's voice command on their phones is the best but this isn't really even close in fact let's compare these two head-to-head for experience results and speed just to see how they go I'm gonna try and start both the voice commands of Google on Android and Bing on Entune at the same time and you can see how they come back and what they bring us I'll use the same search term for both I'll speak simultaneously CBS Interactive okay I got the result on the Toyota Entune system significantly later and I haven't even gotten to navigation yet you saw how much faster it was and I'll tell you about half the time the Entune system knows what I'm talking about about 90% of the time or more the Google system knows what I'm talking about so there's a bit of a gap in the performance here for voice based search to nav or search to call but they're on the right path i heart radio is the streaming version of the stations that are run by Clear Channel the biggest group of radio stations in the country so you can tune around and listen to stations in other markets wherever you're driving I find the buffering and the load time on that app in particular is very slow when I'm changing stations looking for stations launching the app it takes forever once it starts streaming though I found the quality was robust but it also seemed to be taking a lot of headroom on my phone as you might imagine so other things like email and text seem to be slower to come in or occasionally cause this to hiccup note that when I'm on I Heart Radio I do not have any way to drive that via voice this is common - a lot of these into naps and the voice button here on the wheel does not get you there this is only for the old legacy voice commands so a lot of times you'll be driving along that will lock out a lot of the features so you don't get distracted and you're kind of stuck just letting it play or turning it off that's a design flaw movietickets.com is like Fandango you can look for movies and even buy tickets when there's a little gold ticket displayed alongside the film you can look by location nearest theaters or hit the movies button one thing I don't have is a search for title there's nothing like that here where I can type in the name of a movie that makes us a little bit laborious to drag through and trying to find what I'm looking for opentable you know look for restaurants make a reservation see some ratings when I'm moving these buttons blank out so this becomes useless unless you have a history of restaurants this all gets locked out and there's no voice command on this one either and pandora needs the least introduction and you can also send and sync destinations to the car which is a nice feature as well now note this notice these arrows on the left and right clearly Toyota's built in the ability to move two additional panels in the future of more apps but I believe their strategy is going to be always curating the apps so that you can't drop what you want in there from let's say the Android or iOS market they're gonna come in through this master app on the smartphone so overall this is a very ambitious system the key goodness in it the cloud brings down a basket of 5 managed and curated apps and they've chosen good ones and the fact that it's a very well done interface is also very solid the installation of this app was very robust I put this in I set up an account on a Toyota website and I entered my vehicle's VIN number I did have to screw around with a bunch of bluetooth on Bluetooth off monkey business so that parts all solid on the downside too much is locked out when the car is moving from both physical control or even voice control and finally some optimization of the cloud back-end to make things load and snap a little faster I'm pretty sure that's coming this is a general release improvement because this is at one point up so look for this in various toyota vehicles this one has great potential I'm looking forward to seeing the 2.0