Integrated navigation systems can provide more value than what a phone can. The obvious point is that the screen can be bigger, but more valuable is integrated with the car audio to turn down music when giving directions. When driving in tunnels and there is no GPS because it can talk to the car it knows the speed and can provide better estimations. And having permanent buttons right on your dash that you can hit without taking your eyes off the road is something that no phone will have. These are the type of features that a integrated navigation system should absolutely nail.
The navigation in my 13 year old car might be a dinosaurs, but in the world of car software what matters more than age is usability.
Now on the flip side I have used various navigation systems that are almost the exact opposite and are always a pain to use. If that is all you have ever experienced it is entirely understandable that you might think that this years system is a dinosaur. Having recently car shopped I was saddened at the state of many of the systems I tried. They probably have 10X as much computing power, but they were slower and more difficult to use. I could easily see how someone who bought one of these thinking how next years model would be better simply because it would be faster from the faster computer when it is clear that it was lazy coding and a failure to prioritize usability.
In my '13 Hyundai, the navigation UX is pretty good, but I swear that the entertainment part of it was written by a summer intern.
This is also the case using e.g. Waze via Bluetooth connection to the car.
If you live in a place where new roads are built with any frequency, car GPS's become quickly obsolete.
I also find that a car GPS often requires you to use your smartphone anyway, to look up the address of your destination.
The interface was what I loved though. The screen popped up out of the dash* which meant that it was super easy to see without looking down at the center console, and it didn't replace our radio or other screens with the nav, the screen was nav only.
The controls were cursor based (not pointer, but just menu selection) so the buttons were on the back of the steering wheel, so you didn't even have to take your hands off the wheel to run it. All it needed was a 4-way pad and an enter and back button. There was an IR wireless remote that the passenger could use.
One of my favorite features was that it easily supported multiple waypoints, search along route, and it stored routes even when you turned the car off. Taking a multi-day road trip? No problem!
* How the motorized screen still worked on a 10 year old volvo is probably a small miracle considering what didn't work on that car.
For $400 I'll stick with my phone. If only Mazda got CarPlay working on their dashboards as they've been promising for two years now.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the touchscreen/command knob is the way things are now. You can't do terrestrial radio, satellite radio, bluetooth, USB music playback, etc with a single knob and 20-character display. All of these features have worked their way into being standard now. Nobody ships an AM/FM radio.
And now that backup cameras are mandatory in the USA as of the 2018 model year, you're going to need that LCD display anyway. So it's easier to throw all the HMI/IVI on that board and be done with it.
The Mazda Connect is run off an NXP iMX6 SoC, which is very powerful yet affordable enough to put in Mazda's base models for no upgrade charge. It's also highly hackable. =)
Oh, and HVAC is still done with physical knobs in a convenient location.
So weird that it came with a CD player, though. I thought those would have been gone by 2016...
Will it recognise an ext4-formatted drive, or does it require FAT, NTFS or something else?
Perhaps there are two people in the car charging their phones?
I really, really don't understand the hatred for CDs. Why, someone downvoted my original comment because I noted that they can be useful for a long road trip! Honestly, I'd expect that to be non-controversial: CDs require no data connexion; they are a physical audio format, which means that they can be converted to MP3, FLAC or whatever else one likes; they are owned by you, unlike a streaming music service's tracks.
I think that they still have their use cases.
(as an aside, why am I getting hit with 'you're submitting too fast' recently? I'm really not submitting that many comments!)
The 2nd easiest-to-use interface in our vehicles is the USD$85 Pioneer DIN 1 head unit we put in our '81 VW camper van. It does all of what you list, as well as Pandora and (some other music service). Lots of buttons, not just one knob, but I'll bet that display doesn't do a whole lot more than 20 characters.
The most easy-to-use interface we have is CarPlay on the aftermarket head unit in our '04 Scion xB. Any cars we buy in the future will have CarPlay or no sale. I'm done with crap ass automotive UIs done by some designer trying to make her mark on the world. And though I'm sure some makers have UIs that don't suck, I'm not going to the trouble to find out which. CarPlay or nothing.
Unfortunately it also runs less smoothly and it's uglier and RDS traffic info is less reliable than phone one. At least for me the simpler UI and phone battery saving rally outweigh the downsides though.
(I got my nav included with the car, but compared to VAG group which charges 1000EUR+ for nav unit, 400EUR didn't seem to be all that much IMO.)
OTOH the interfaces of built-in navs &al tend to be unmitigated disasters.
At the end of the day, phone integration (Android's Auto and Apple's CarPlay) are probably what you want.
The "big-screen dinosaur" is incredibly helpful for showing routes and directions, much better than the dinky smartphone screen.
Easily replaceable, cheaper, better design.
No thanks.
I assume most people take their phone around with them these days. I have a magnetic mount in my car, so as I'm sitting down I just lay it on the magnet on the dash and go.
also satellite radio and weather/traffic is useful. if i want directions my phone will play them audibly over bluetooth while i look at my dash map (it's the same map!)
i think any car with bluetooth and a halfway decent regular map will be useful for years to come. my parents have a 10 year old car with a map that's still useful for basic nav.