I listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast and they keep mentioning Ford Sync. As I’m not a fan of American cars (old biases die hard), I never thought I’d get a chance to try out Ford Sync. On our recent vacation, we rented a car which happened to be a brand new Ford Focus (it had 8 miles on it when we got it). Since I’ve never had good luck getting radio stations when renting cars, I made sure I brought cables to plug in my phone. I had a USB cable as well as a 3.5 mm patch cord. I was about to plug in the patch cord when I realized there was a USB plug in the center console. I plugged in my iPhone and the system immediately recognized it.
Pretty cool, I thought. My wife started playing with it and was able to browse all the music on my iPhone and we enjoyed music throughout the trip. In addition, all of the prompts for Navigon were played through the car stereo. I tried to use the voice recognition, but didn’t spend much time with it. It seemed to work OK, but without knowing the vocabulary, navigating it was difficult.
I didn’t try out making a phone call through it, nor did I try the navigation as I already had Navigon on my iPhone. I was pretty impressed with the technology and would love to see something like it in my next car; however, the chances of me buying a Ford are pretty slim. I do like a larger screen for navigating audio, like my wife has in her Honda CR-V and the navigation on the LCD is easy to use.