Bullseye! The 2011 Lincoln MKX matches the best-selling Lexus RX 350 on most fronts and blows away all mid-size SUV competitors with a dazzling new version of Sync, SD Card navigation, affordable high-tech options, and to-die-for audio. So long as you like big chrome wheels, you’ll be a happy driver. A fully optioned MKX puts you on the high side of $50,000, but there’s the humbler Ford Edge stablemate as a fallback. Lincoln’s best-in-class cockpit technology puts the MKX on the short list of every midsize-SUV buyer. You’ll have to decide if the MKX platform is as competitive as the embedded technology.
File this one under Good Intentions, Still a Dumb Idea: Lincoln’s capacitive-touch sliders for volume control and fan speed on the 2011 Lincoln MKX crossover. By sliding your finger across touch-sensitive strips on the center stack, the driver or passenger can move the audio volume up or down. Same for the fan speed. It’s high-tech and oh-so-cool. However: Capacitive touch is also slower, less intuitive, and nearly unworkable on bumpy roads. Give me a big round volume knob any day.
Don’t type when you can talk, says Google. The search giant has strengthened its existing voice-command feature on Android and introduced a new application called Chrome-to-Phone, for syncing with Chrome browsers.
Voice Search, despite its name, now lets you do more than just search: It will let users send texts, compose e-mails, call businesses, navigate, jot notes, and set the alarm on their phone by just speaking into the device.
The voice commands, called “voice actions,” are part of Google’s effort to improve the user interface on Android and let consumers go beyond the traditional keyboard and touchscreen interface on their phones.
The Voice Search application is currently available only for phones running version 2.2 of the Android OS — which means HTC Evo, Nexus One and Droid 2 users can get it on their phones immediately.
Google also launched a mobile sync app to link its Chrome browser to Android 2.2 devices. The tool lets users on Google’s Chrome browser click an icon to send a webpage or a map to their phone. The page or map is then almost immediately available on the phone.
“This is a low-latency, super-fast app for pushing data to the phone,” says Dave Burke, engineering manager for Google.
Google debuted voice search for Android phones in the United States about two years ago. But voice recognition built as a feature into the operating system was limited. Still one out of every four queries, or 25 percent of queries, on devices running Android 2.0 OS and higher comes through the voice interface, says Google.
That earlier version of the voice command allowed users to do just three things: web search, call a specific contact and navigate to an address.
The new voice search app goes beyond that. For instance, you can speak the name of a song or a band into the phone and the app will go online, find the music and show a list of apps such as Pandora and last.fm that can play the music you want. About 12 voice commands are now available to Android 2.2 users.
But when it comes to the Chrome-to-Phone app, the service is more limited. It is currently available to only Chrome users, though some Firefox users are also using it. The sync feature is also only available for Android devices, though Google says it will work to bring the feature to iPhone users as an app.
To get a more detailed look at Google’s Voice Search app, check out their video:
After Google’s Nexus One, HTC’s Evo 4G phone is the first device to get upgraded to the latest Android 2.2 Froyo version of the operating system. But some users are not happy about it.
The Froyo update has broken the syncing of multiple Gmail accounts on the device. The results is that only the primary Gmail account is updated automatically. Second and third Gmail accounts have to be manually refreshed to pull in new e-mails, say Evo users on forums such as Android Central and Google’s Android support board.
“My two Gmail accounts have always worked great on 2.1. Moving to 2.2 my primary Gmail pushes instantly. My secondary Gmail account doesn’t sync at all. I have to manually sync to get it to work,” says ‘tommy m‘, an Evo user who first posted about the issue on the Android Central forum.
The problem also means that users don’t see new e-mail notifications from secondary accounts.
A HTC spokesman told Wired.com the company is aware of the bug but does not see it as a widespread issue.
“The good news is that it has not affected a majority of users,” says Keith Nowak. “We are working to find a fix.”
HTC and Sprint, the exclusive carrier for the Evo, started pushing out Froyo to customers on August 3. The update offers features such as voice dialing over Bluetooth, the ability to store apps on the external memory card and browser improvements including a faster JavaScript engine and Flash support.
The problems with syncing of multiple Gmail accounts flared up right after the Evo moved to Android 2.2. Some Froyo users have been offering homebrewed solutions on message boards including deleting the accounts and adding them again with a change to the mail setting of ‘notify once.’ But the solution hasn’t worked reliably for all users.
Good news for Wildfire owners: fresh from HTC’s oven is its 3.0 desktop sync suite that — like the one baked for the Desire over the weekend — enables iTunes sync for the company’s latest budget device. Since we had a Wildfire on hand, we decided to go through the trouble to check out this new feature. And boy, it sure was a bumpy start. We had no problems with obtaining the software, but in order to get the “HTC Sync” option to appear in the USB connection menu, we had to switch on USB debugging mode (Settings -> Applications -> Development) before establishing our first link. As fiddly as it sounds, this was actually the only tricky part of the preparation, and you can leave debugging mode switched off afterwards.
So, how does the iTunes sync work? Well, it’s certainly nowhere as thrilling as Palm’s cheeky hack — it appears to simply access iTunes’ database and playlists for the file locations, rather than fooling iTunes into thinking your Wildfire’s an iDevice. You’ll also be limited to syncing either everything or just selected playlists (smart playlists supported), so in other words, you can’t sync by artists or genres, and you’ll have to set up a dedicated playlist for syncing podcasts. Apart from this minor flaw, we’d say this is still a pretty neat solution for an age-old problem, and hopefully HTC will offer a similar app for Mac users. Hands-on video after the break.
Have you broken into a Ford lately? The 2011 Ford Sync includes unique features that might initially make some Fords and Lincolns attractive to thieves. It may also have you underestimating the true cost of Ford’s SD Card Premium Navigation. It’s all because Ford now bases its newest navigation system on an easily removed SD Card that lets you choose to add factory navigation at any time, so long as your car has a built-in color LCD display, called MyFord Touch.
Merely days after iTunes 9.2 hit the pipes in order to enable iPhone 4 syncing, Apple‘s software team has pushed out the first “minor” update since with 9.2.1. Truth be told, the list of changes, fixes and tweaks is rather lengthy for a simple point-point update, with this one allowing users to organize apps on the iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes, organize and sync PDF documents as books, etc. As for fixes? For starters, it’ll “disable older versions of some incompatible third-party plug-ins” (thanks?), while also addressing “minor issues with dragging and dropping items, a performance issue when first syncing to some devices with iTunes 9.2” and other general speed issues that users were reporting. As for iBooks 1.1.1, that one still seems to be propagating through the iTunes server factory, promising support for books with audio and video, improvements for PDF documents and other miscellaneous bug fixes. Feel free to toss your impressions of the new builds in comments below, but don’t blame us if your eagerness ends up breaking something you love dearly.
Ford halved the price of embedded navigation with the introduction of SD Card Premium Navigation, which will cost $795 when it arrives on the 2011 Ford Edge in late August as part of the MyFord Touch system. What would be embarrassingly pricy in a portable navigation device is astoundingly cheap as part of a new car, since most onboard navigation runs $1,500 to $2,000. You can choose to order navigation when you take delivery or later and in the meantime you can use Ford’s cloud-based TDI (trips, directions, information) navigation, which is free for the first three years of ownership.
The second generation of Ford Sync represents a big step for what is already the industry’s most comprehensive, affordable Bluetooth and music player system. Sync now understands almost 10,000 words, has a flattened command structure that lets you issue any command at any time (as a music player command while using the phone menu), and one-shot navigation system address entry that lets you speak number, street, and city all at once. Sync shows to best advantage with the rollout of MyFord Touch, which puts an 8-inch touchscreen LCD standard in some Ford and Lincoln cars.
We’ll be honest — we weren’t the biggest fans of SYNC from the onset, but that had more to do with its insistence on playing Run DMC on our request for Naughty By Nature during a cross-town CES run than anything else. Now, Ford remains one of the few automakers that actually bothers to update their navigation systems on a consistent basis, and while SYNC is still far from perfect, it’s getting a rather significant update today. The introduction of MyFord Touch brings the amount of commands that SYNC understands up to 10,000 — that’s a pretty big jump from 100, where it began. Following in BMW’s footsteps, Ford is also integrating voice control technology from Nuance, which allows drivers to speak “more naturally” to the system rather than having to memorize a few hundreds first-level snippets. Unfortunately, we still think voice control within vehicles is too slow; much like Windows Vista, there are simply too many confirmation prompts, too many forks in the decision tree and not enough of an overall benefit to chose it over handling things with your digits. Feel free to disagree and pick this up on your 2011 Ford Edge, but be sure to view the video past the jump before getting all hot and bothered.
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