I grabbed the iPhone of my fan girl and gave Carplay a whirl after the update.
Some first impressions between us AA friends:
- Connection wasn't as smooth as I hoped. Even though the phone was already connected to the car it did not recognize CP capability. Instructions said pair agian, so I did. But this took a lot of fumbling between phone and car. Maybe I am not iPhone proficient
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- Once the car made the handshake and CP was enabled, launching it wirelessly just didn't work. I get the pin wheel for some tens of seconds then the interface gives up, likely timing out on the connection.
- After 20 minutes and about 10 failed retries, I gave up and got a cord. Success!
- The CP operation is standard. Siri answers when pressing the mic long and apps work fine. Pressing the Lucid app gets you back to the main UI, with an added button on the far right corner to return to CP. All that is good.
Now to the needs improvement:
- getting out of CP any other way - say with the home button - exits. You need to reconnect from the devices menu again (this needs a main botton).
- the CP real estate is tiny for the Lucid. I am sure it is the standard size in other cars, but given the size of the screens I get the feeling of watching a recording of an old analog movie on an ultra HD TV.
- integration is confined to the app rectangle. Navigation and audio don't move to the pilot panel or the cockpit. Unless you really depend on Waze or hate native navigation, the native experience ends up being better.
This is a good start, and if I had an iPhone I'd take YouTube music integration (it is my main audio app). But, now that I saw it, I am thinking maybe using the Apple fan boys and girls feedback as they ease into it will help make the initial AA integration better out of the gate.
Silver linings.
www.forbes.com
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