Honda debuts Android-based connect unit

[MUSIC] Hi. I'm Wayne Cunningham here at the Paris Motor Show, And I'm taking a look at the new Honda Connect head unit. This is the new head unit for the cars. Combines navigation and all that. But the really cool thing about this gearhead unit, is it's actually running the Android operating system. Which gives it a lot of flexibility for apps and the like. And also underneath the hardware, there's an NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip running this thing. So that's got a fairly robust computing platform. When we look at this interface here, we get a tiled interface, a fairly attractive tiled interface, a very modern look but this is actually one of interfaces you can load, at least as they have on the demos here at the Paris show. Now when I look at this one, one of the first tiles I see is navigation. Now that's at the center of most head units. If I hit that tile, that brings up a very familiar looking Garmin icons here, the Garmin where to and the Garmin view map. Buttons. If I take a look at the map, I see a, a regular, kinda perspective view map. And that's again, this is Garmen software. This is actually the Garmen navigator app we're seeing here. And this should also do live searches as well because, this is a connected unit in the sense that it's actually running data from a connected smartphone. when you have your smartphone connected to the system, that's how this gets data through. Now, we go back to the main screen here. And the coolest thing about this is the app integration. The fact that with Android, we can load all sorts of apps on here. So if I hit this one button on the side, I bring up my App Center, and I can find new apps. Here's the apps that are loaded on the system. Right now, I have Aha Radio. That's internet radio service. You can have a web browser here. That's kinda cool. If I hit the Honda App Center icon,. This is where I can find new apps for the system actually, apps that are available on the app store that Honda's going to run on. Honda's going to curate these apps, they're not going to let you load apps that they don't deem are safe for the car. Looking at my car apps section here I've got a number of apps, I've got, again Aha, I've got [UNKNOWN] that's an internet radio service. I've got a, a unbranded fuel prices app and a parking app too. Those are all useful things. They only show a few apps here right now but being Android they can have anything that's really available on the store right now. There's a ton of apps that they can make available to drivers. If I go back to my main screen here. I've got my standard, [UNKNOWN] of features, like the stereo, for example. Here's this audio tile here. And right now, we're seeing an FM play screen. This is just standard radio stuff. I look at my sources here, I've got USB, iPod integration, Bluetooth streaming, even an HDMI input. This is all stuff that's gonna be standard within this [INAUDIBLE] connect system, but the app integration is really the exiting part about this, and the Android operating system just gives you so much flexibility in that regard. This new Honda connect system is gonna be available in the new Honda CRV and the Honda Civic. But, only the European versions for now. This is a fairly major hardware and software roll out, so I would expect Honda's going to roll these out to other regions in the future, but for now we don't really have any information about availability in the U.S. I'm Wayne Cunningham, here at the 2014 Paris Motor Show. [MUSIC]