A Little Out of Sync
12/5/2007
Ford System Has Highlights, But Room to Improve
I’ve already established my penchant for all things nerdy, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when the Chief Mama here at Mother Proof asked me to put the Sync system through its paces in the 2008 Ford Focus I recently tested. I’d been reading about the system for a couple of months, so I was excited to try it out. It only took a couple of minutes in the car to realize that Sync would require my undivided attention if I wanted to learn how to use it to its full capacity.
Sync, a joint venture by Microsoft and Ford, is a voice-activated communication and entertainment system that appears in several new Ford cars. It’s a software system, which means Microsoft can update it to accommodate changing technology and address problems that might arise. As all moms know, flexibility is a quality we value in almost any product.
Although my neighbors are used to seeing me sit in my driveway with the car running while I geek out on all the features, they usually don’t see me sitting for close to an hour. One neighbor was so curious she came over to knock on the window on her way to pick up her mail. For you city-dwellers who are alarmed by this behavior, rest assured that nosiness is one of the more common — and obnoxious — features of suburbia. Partly due to being startled and partly because I had been unsuccessful in hooking up my phone, I was not in the mood to chitchat. Instead, I told her I had to get inside to make dinner for my hungry, neglected children.
Of course, once I got inside my children were told it was “make your own dinner night” and I promptly went to my computer to look up www.syncmyride.com. I was bound and determined to make my phone work. The website was easy to navigate, so my negative attitude waned a bit. I found a list of phones that have been thoroughly tested and are currently supported by Sync, but my phone was not on the list. I decided to call customer support to see if they had any tips and tricks to help get me up and running and living the American Ford dream. In this case, the dream was to make a phone call or two and have the system read me my text messages.
Customer service was very friendly, and even called me back when they couldn’t answer my question right away, but the answer was still, no, zip, nada, nothing. I was eventually able to get another phone in my family to work for calling purposes, but not reading messages. On paper, the text messaging capabilities look great; not only should you be able to listen to an incoming text message, but Sync will also let you respond with a set of predetermined commands.
I decided to chalk the phone issues up to the fact that they couldn’t possibly get every phone working prior to release. In fact, the list only has about 30 phones that have been tested. Luckily, because Sync is software-based, the engineers at Ford and Microsoft are constantly working to make more phones compatible. My advice for consumers would be to check out the aforementioned list on the Sync My Ride website before spending your child’s college tuition on a car because it includes Sync.
The feature that I found to be completely delicious was the music player integration. I plugged in my iPod with its USB cable, and my playlist names displayed on the center console. After practicing the lingo for a few days, I became adept at moving between artists, playlists, genres and albums. The biggest part of the learning curve was remembering the hierarchy and vernacular for the system. For instance, a song is not a song, it is a track. Once I had a handle on that, we were constantly rolling with tunes. Using the “Find Similar Music” feature was by far my favorite thing. As I explained to my kids, it uses lots of math to find music that is similar to the song (uh, track) we have playing. That’s just another reason why math is important. And no, I never stop sounding like a mother.
Another Sync feature that should keep families entertained is the ability to use custom ringtones from your phone within Sync, plus the system’s multilingual support. My kids and I used the system in French and Spanish for about 10 minutes apiece; that’s about how long it took to reach our vocabulary limit, at which point we switched back to English. While I’m sure that wasn’t the intended purpose, getting some real world practice with language never hurts, right?
Sync’s potential is huge, but its actual implementation is a little wooly. The next update will likely solve some of the issues I ran into, and maybe offer future enhancements and features. I am cautiously optimistic that the demand for Sync will speed improvements in phone compatibility. I am also thrilled with the fact that, at $395, high demand is a real possibility.
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