Starting a topic to discuss people's experience with CarPlay in the XC90.
I have only spent 30 minutes with it so far, so very preliminary experience. I suspect there is a bit of a learning curve, which is ironic because that's against Apple's core principle about how their software should just intuitively work. So I'm sure I'll have more to say later, but here's a start...
DISCLAIMER -- I am used to providing detailed feedback on UI's so I am more critical than many. And just because I focus on things I don't love doesn't mean I don't like something overall. Also, I am narrowly focusing on CarPlay here, not on Sensus in general. I look forward to the improvements there but haven't tried them yet.
INTEGRATION WITH SENSUS
Everyone has seen the pictures and early demo video, so not much to report visually. It takes over the bottom pane of the Sensus screen as you have seen. The Navigation and Phone panes instead of displaying the normal information they would instead say something to the effect of "Routing through Apple CarPlay" and "Phone through Apple CarPlay" (I am doing this from memory so my wording might be slightly off). Similarly, if you play music through your phone the Media pane gives a similar message about how music is controlled through CarPlay.
With the exception of being able to hold down the voice commands button to trigger Siri and the screen interface as described above, there is little to no interplay between Sensus and Siri which sometimes can be awkward or jarring. For example, if you click on the Media pane while playing music on your phone through CarPlay it instantly cuts off whatever you were listening to on the phone and switches to one of the car native sources, like SiriusXM or FM. Once you did this you would have to start over with Siri to find whatever you were playing before. In my case I was in one of my playlists and I had to start it over from the beginning. This separation also made it less functional than when you previously could access your phone's music through Bluetooth (which is disabled while using CarPlay) or the iPod option, both of which allowed you to go into the Media pane without automatically switching sources and which allowed you to resume where you left off.
Messages is similarly not integrated. Siri reading your texts is a million times more natural sounding that Sensus, butyou lose the ability to choose to read or close messages using your steering wheels buttons and have to glance over to the screen or hit a virtual button or use Siri voice commands. This was particularly frustrating because Siri wouldn't automatically prompt you to read new messages when they arrived like Sensus used to.
CarPlay UI
I have to say, overall I wasn't impressed. For some reason, Siri acts quite differently on CarPlay than with my phone by itself disconnected from the car. I understand they wanted to limit what you could do for distractions but I am talking about core things that you need to do.
A few examples:
1) Siri through CarPlay gives you almost no time to begin saying what you want it to do. I clocked it at about 1 second. I can't even recall how many times I started talking and it cut me off and said it didn't get what I said because it stopped listening too quickly. This is far different than how long Siri gives you without CarPlay.
2) Siri was inconsistent in prompting for follow-up voice commands. In a few cases it did, but more often it would ask a question but not be listening for a response and you would have to hold the voice commands button for several seconds to follow-up even with a simple "yes." Very inefficient and, again, not how Siri without CarPlay handled similar prompts. Sometimes it it was even worse -- it would prompt for a question and provide the ability to tap the screen if you were willing to be distracted but not give the option to speak your answer even if you did use the voice command button -- triggering the button would cause Siri to cancel out of what you were doing and treat your prompt as a completely new action.
3) Siri was being picker than usual about what you said to get an action done. It took 3 tries to cancel navigation. The first two times it said "Okay" after my prompt as if it understood but went right on navigating. The third time it said the same "Okay" but actually worked.
4) Because of the lack of tight integration between Sensus and Siri, navigating between CarPlay apps can be distracting. There is a small virtual button on the center screen in the lower left that you have to tap to get back to the CarPlay home screen. So if you are in Maps you have to divert your eyes from the road, look for that small icon, tap it, see all the icons in the bottom pane, possibly swipe through multiple pages of apps to find the one you want, say a music streaming app, tap into that, then repeat the whole process in reverse to get back to Maps to resume your navigation.
Even weirder and more concerning, Siri flat out didn't seem to be accessing my phone's data correctly when connected to CarPlay. For example, I tried to text my wife, then my daughter and finally my son. All our in my Favorites and in every case I have clear phone and email addresses for them in my phone's contacts. But with my wife and daughter it would say, "I have two contacts for XXX and neither one has a phone number or email address." It would say the name correctly, so I know it got that right. But it was wrong about having two and it was flat out wrong that there were no phone or email addresses. Tried my son and it worked fine. After I disconnected from the car, I tried Siri the normal way to text my wife and it worked great -- so it specifically acted differently with CarPlay than without. And I had tried my wife 5 times with CarPlay so it wasn't a fluke. This particular quirk bugs me the most because if Siri is not going to correctly access my phone's contacts to let me text, email or phone people it's pretty close to useless and I doubt I will bother plugging in the phone much and living with all the other trade-offs.
The one thing that worked fine so far was accessing my music using Siri with CarPlay. This functioned like I have come to expect from Siri. I have a play list that's called my first initial's favorites. Instead I told Siri to play name name's favorites and it figured it out anyway. Very nice.
I only tried to route to one address so far with Apple Maps, so hardly a fair test. But it wasn't impressive navigating from the dealer to my home. It picked a poor route despite my encountering no traffic congestion when I ignored it and took the more logical route. And it kept stubbornly suggesting I make turns that would have taken me far out of my way even as I got within 2 miles of my home along an almost straight route along an uncrowded country road. If I had followed it, it would have doubled my distance to the destination. I haven't tried using Apple Maps with my phone to navigate home in a long time, so I am assuming it would have performed the same. So far Google and Waze seem to be the champs for understanding the roads in my immediate area.
Another interesting experience -- and one point I told Siri to do something and it basically froze for a full minute. It froze on the screen that was processing what I said. It wouldn't respond to any touch commands or further attempts to talk to it. Finally it said it had lost Internet connection and to try again later and unfroze. I checked my phone and have full bars LTE. I waited a minute and tried again and it worked.
I have only spent 30 minutes with it so far, so very preliminary experience. I suspect there is a bit of a learning curve, which is ironic because that's against Apple's core principle about how their software should just intuitively work. So I'm sure I'll have more to say later, but here's a start...
DISCLAIMER -- I am used to providing detailed feedback on UI's so I am more critical than many. And just because I focus on things I don't love doesn't mean I don't like something overall. Also, I am narrowly focusing on CarPlay here, not on Sensus in general. I look forward to the improvements there but haven't tried them yet.
INTEGRATION WITH SENSUS
Everyone has seen the pictures and early demo video, so not much to report visually. It takes over the bottom pane of the Sensus screen as you have seen. The Navigation and Phone panes instead of displaying the normal information they would instead say something to the effect of "Routing through Apple CarPlay" and "Phone through Apple CarPlay" (I am doing this from memory so my wording might be slightly off). Similarly, if you play music through your phone the Media pane gives a similar message about how music is controlled through CarPlay.
With the exception of being able to hold down the voice commands button to trigger Siri and the screen interface as described above, there is little to no interplay between Sensus and Siri which sometimes can be awkward or jarring. For example, if you click on the Media pane while playing music on your phone through CarPlay it instantly cuts off whatever you were listening to on the phone and switches to one of the car native sources, like SiriusXM or FM. Once you did this you would have to start over with Siri to find whatever you were playing before. In my case I was in one of my playlists and I had to start it over from the beginning. This separation also made it less functional than when you previously could access your phone's music through Bluetooth (which is disabled while using CarPlay) or the iPod option, both of which allowed you to go into the Media pane without automatically switching sources and which allowed you to resume where you left off.
Messages is similarly not integrated. Siri reading your texts is a million times more natural sounding that Sensus, butyou lose the ability to choose to read or close messages using your steering wheels buttons and have to glance over to the screen or hit a virtual button or use Siri voice commands. This was particularly frustrating because Siri wouldn't automatically prompt you to read new messages when they arrived like Sensus used to.
CarPlay UI
I have to say, overall I wasn't impressed. For some reason, Siri acts quite differently on CarPlay than with my phone by itself disconnected from the car. I understand they wanted to limit what you could do for distractions but I am talking about core things that you need to do.
A few examples:
1) Siri through CarPlay gives you almost no time to begin saying what you want it to do. I clocked it at about 1 second. I can't even recall how many times I started talking and it cut me off and said it didn't get what I said because it stopped listening too quickly. This is far different than how long Siri gives you without CarPlay.
2) Siri was inconsistent in prompting for follow-up voice commands. In a few cases it did, but more often it would ask a question but not be listening for a response and you would have to hold the voice commands button for several seconds to follow-up even with a simple "yes." Very inefficient and, again, not how Siri without CarPlay handled similar prompts. Sometimes it it was even worse -- it would prompt for a question and provide the ability to tap the screen if you were willing to be distracted but not give the option to speak your answer even if you did use the voice command button -- triggering the button would cause Siri to cancel out of what you were doing and treat your prompt as a completely new action.
3) Siri was being picker than usual about what you said to get an action done. It took 3 tries to cancel navigation. The first two times it said "Okay" after my prompt as if it understood but went right on navigating. The third time it said the same "Okay" but actually worked.
4) Because of the lack of tight integration between Sensus and Siri, navigating between CarPlay apps can be distracting. There is a small virtual button on the center screen in the lower left that you have to tap to get back to the CarPlay home screen. So if you are in Maps you have to divert your eyes from the road, look for that small icon, tap it, see all the icons in the bottom pane, possibly swipe through multiple pages of apps to find the one you want, say a music streaming app, tap into that, then repeat the whole process in reverse to get back to Maps to resume your navigation.
Even weirder and more concerning, Siri flat out didn't seem to be accessing my phone's data correctly when connected to CarPlay. For example, I tried to text my wife, then my daughter and finally my son. All our in my Favorites and in every case I have clear phone and email addresses for them in my phone's contacts. But with my wife and daughter it would say, "I have two contacts for XXX and neither one has a phone number or email address." It would say the name correctly, so I know it got that right. But it was wrong about having two and it was flat out wrong that there were no phone or email addresses. Tried my son and it worked fine. After I disconnected from the car, I tried Siri the normal way to text my wife and it worked great -- so it specifically acted differently with CarPlay than without. And I had tried my wife 5 times with CarPlay so it wasn't a fluke. This particular quirk bugs me the most because if Siri is not going to correctly access my phone's contacts to let me text, email or phone people it's pretty close to useless and I doubt I will bother plugging in the phone much and living with all the other trade-offs.
The one thing that worked fine so far was accessing my music using Siri with CarPlay. This functioned like I have come to expect from Siri. I have a play list that's called my first initial's favorites. Instead I told Siri to play name name's favorites and it figured it out anyway. Very nice.
I only tried to route to one address so far with Apple Maps, so hardly a fair test. But it wasn't impressive navigating from the dealer to my home. It picked a poor route despite my encountering no traffic congestion when I ignored it and took the more logical route. And it kept stubbornly suggesting I make turns that would have taken me far out of my way even as I got within 2 miles of my home along an almost straight route along an uncrowded country road. If I had followed it, it would have doubled my distance to the destination. I haven't tried using Apple Maps with my phone to navigate home in a long time, so I am assuming it would have performed the same. So far Google and Waze seem to be the champs for understanding the roads in my immediate area.
Another interesting experience -- and one point I told Siri to do something and it basically froze for a full minute. It froze on the screen that was processing what I said. It wouldn't respond to any touch commands or further attempts to talk to it. Finally it said it had lost Internet connection and to try again later and unfroze. I checked my phone and have full bars LTE. I waited a minute and tried again and it worked.
