-Now as you know, Ford got out in front on in car sort of telematics and interface and even connectivity with SYNC and MyFord Touch came along with the most ambitious upgrade to that, but it tripped over itself in a couple of ways.
There was 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 have significantly overhauled MyFord 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 home screen 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 or 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 were finding it was very slow to get the system booted after you've 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 that everytime 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 here on the left, they used to kind of override each other.
You'd have Sirius on top of its logo.
You might have some frequencies or megahertz along side 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 the system.
Small thing, but they had to hear about this too.
The clock is 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 this 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 on 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 to have.
This will be coming out first on the Escape, the Flex, and the Taurus in early 2012
as new 2013 models and as all the 2013s roll out from Ford, they will have this spread across them.
The other good news for those of you who have a MyFord Touch-equipped car for the last year and a half from when it first debuted, they're gonna mail you a fun drive that you stick in the USB port that will do this field upgrade.
So, all the MyFord Touch cars are gonna get to this level, bringing everybody forward.
