Audi rocks CES with an Android tablet, refined MMI

Hi. I'm Wayne Cunningham here at CES 2014 in Audi's booth, looking at the Audi Smart Display. Now, this is an Android tablet that Audi launched here at the show. It's got a nice aluminum case. It's supposed to be fairly durable for the automotive environment. It actually integrates with the car. It's not just a tablet on its own. So, it's connecting to the car through Wi-Fi. I've got a little demonstration of the car's infotainment center here. So, your passengers can sit with this tablet and say, they can pull up the map, they can pull up navigation, maybe do a search for something for you if you don't wanna do a search on your own or you're busy driving, do a free-form search. We'll just throw in the Audi on here. And so, we get a list of locations that show up here. Now, I can just drag one of these over if I pull up navigation here. It will automatically load whatever destination I put from here on to the car's navigation. So, your passenger can do all the navigating for you. Likewise, your passenger can also be your DJ. And also, we have a nice little car screen here. This actually showed the car's speed and other information. That's actually coming from the car into the tablet. You can't really do that with any other Android tablet, only with one that's really connected and integrated with the car like this one is. But also, the cool thing is we can also go to standard Android functionality. We got our apps right here, we got a whole screen full of apps. We can have any Android app loaded onto here, so your passengers can use this. And this tablet is gonna be connected to the car's Wi-Fi hotspot, has a 4G connection out to the internet. And so, they can just do anything they want on here-- watch movies or whatever while you drive. So, now, let's go over here to this Audi TT Virtual Cockpit. Audi brought the interior of its upcoming Audi TT model. Now, the TT is gonna be really exciting when it comes out later this year. We haven't seen that car yet, but we are seeing the cockpit. We're seeing a whole new infotainment system. They've really updated their multimedia interface with this fully new system. They call it the Virtual Cockpit. So, what we have is a fully LCD instrument cluster here. So, of course, we have our gauges and the like, and we can look at our speed and our tachometer and stuff like that. But then, if we wanna look at the infotainment functions, I can push this View button and I get my functions for radio, media, telephone, and navigation. We'll take a look at navigation first. So, I also have a new controller over your hardware controller. And they've simplified this with these kinda toggle switches for your navigation map telephone, and radio and media. So, I can also go quickly to navigation just by pushing one of these buttons here, or I can use the menu here. So, I go to navigation, and now, I get a full-on map shown on this LCD instrument cluster right in front of me. That's extremely cool. And if I wanna find a destination, there's a touchpad on top of this dial, so I can start tracing in letters. This is kinda like the touchpad in other Audis, but it's a little more refined, it's also on top of this dial to make it more compact. I found a result here, so I just push down here and it automatically throws it in the navigation. And it sets on my route guidance. Now, if I wanna look at media sources, I can just flip this button here on this side, and now, I can see my various media sources playing here. And they also, of course, have telephone. And same thing, the same search function also works with your address book. So, I have my phone paired to this car. I can start tracing letters to find anybody in my address book. And it will bring up a list, bring up the results. I can place a college by pushing down on the central controller here. It's a really cool system. They've really streamlined this in-- my interface. This virtual cockpit takes what Audi had before and makes it a lot easier to get around, a lot easier to find things. The information flow is just so much better, and it's gonna be really exciting when we get this car on the road. I'm Wayne Cunningham here at CES 2014 for CNET.