As a recent owner of a new Ford vehicle that includes the SYNC system I thought a review might be in order. Ford Sync is described at syncmyride.com. Its major features include:
- Hands free calling with a Bluetooth enabled phone
- Hands free music playback
- 911 Assist
- Hands free text messaging
- Turn by turn navigation
- Vehicle health report
Unfortunately, the last two features above are currently only available in the United States. Here in Canada they are still being worked on. On a personal note I hope they hurry up and get it enabled. The nice thing is by registering the vehicle on syncmyride.com an email warning will appear once an upgrade is available. The upgrade and a loader program get put on a USB thumb drive. Put them in the vehicle and boom…updated system. In my opinion this software based system is a much better setup than a hardware based system, that likely would be harder to upgrade.
In terms of the hands free setup all the controls are on the steering wheel. A “voice command” button is used to get SYNC’s attention. You then select by voice what service you want (Phone or USB). During the Bluetooth pairing exercise SYNC downloaded the address book from the phone. So any contact can be dialed by name and by location (cell, home, office, etc). Any incoming call’s ID is displayed on the display console.
Selecting USB (assuming an iPod, Zune, any other MP3 player, or even a thumb drive with music on it) will index the music on the device; building a catalog of metadata regarding each of the songs. Title, Artist, Genre, and Album are all indexed. Once indexing is completed you can “tell” SYNC to play any of these items by calling for a track, artist, etc. SYNC also has a play “similar” feature. Find a song you like then ask SYNC to “play similar”.
911 Assist places a 911 call on your behalf if the airbags are deployed, a very comforting safety system. The hands free texting will read out incoming text messages and allow you to select from a set of canned responses. Unfortunately, this feature requires a cell phone that supports a text profile over Bluetooth, something my BlackBerry 8120 does not do.
All in all I am very impressed with this setup and feature. It was jointly developed by Ford and Microsoft and it works very well. At a $500 option it was well worth it.
