For 2010 Mustang owners with SYNC...

One of the features that is often shown on Sync centers on "Services" - traffic, weather, directions, news, and sports.

Do you use it? How often?

What are your gripes?


While I use it (primarily for traffic to/from work), I find it inconvenient that it has to make a phone call to do so. It would be very slick to have it do this in the background without interrupting the audio program I'm listening to.

 

I have an Iphone 3Gs. Its really lacking compared to what it can do. First time i tried using the navigation service, it couldnt find the tint place i was driving to. I knew how to get there, but the business name AZM Tint, would bring up random places each time i retried. I gave up on that. I wish you could Upload a route and waypoints from your computer (google maps?) to the Sync with a thumb drive and have that tell the services phone number via a pre planned route option.

Traffic seems ok, and weather info could be useful if you were somewhere other then home. News is meh. All in all its not a bad set of tools, but there are much better ways of accomplishing each of its services.

 

I've used the directions feature once just to see if it worked. Other than that I haven't really had a need to use them.

 

You can at least input waypoints on your computer via the syncmyride site, but the routes is a different story.

I think they have more room to enhance the functionality -- but the hook to the microsoft mothership via a cell phone call feels like a simple answer to a complex problem (connectivity) and will thus be a bottleneck.

Given the popularity of smartphones (iphone, blackberry, palm pre, etc) there is a huge opportunity to connect via bluetooth for a data connection and allow for non-phone services capability. Traffic alerts, weather alerts, etc. can be streamed that way (vs. the silly sms method in place now / the full sms integration is limited to a handful of providers and phones, rendering it useless).