Bolder Boulder Road Trip - Day 3

Miles Driven: 448.3
Average MPG: 38.8

Today's goal was to arrive in Boulder, CO. Along the way, 11 counties were run in 3 states. It was a good day, but I was getting tired by the time I got to the Interstate in Limon, CO.

I was very surprised that the Tomtom GPS did not have the hotel I was staying at in its database. I had it set for Boulder, CO. After filling in Limon, I used the SYNC Services option to get directions to the hotel. This worked very well. I spent part of the run into Boulder talking with my father using SYNC. Directions were announced with a tone and shown in the display in the center of the dashboard. Normally, this would be announced by voice in addition to the tone and display.

I prefer map-based guidance, but the SYNC directions are very usable and have been perfectly reliable. On this trip, there were two failures of the recently updated Tomtom with the currently available map data.

SYNC First Impressions

I've used SYNC to access music and podcasts on a USB drive. This works fairly well. I'm still getting used to how the drive is processed by the sound system, but it is well described in the Manual.

Today, I bought a new phone (my four year-old phone did not have Bluetooth). It was easy to "pair" the phone and the car. After that, it was easy to download the contacts in the phone to SYNC. I used this to call my father who said it sounded good. Sound quality was very good. I also like how I can check the signal strength and battery charge through the console interface. The only issue so far is that the volume of the call was enough down from the volume of the voice prompts which leads to a bit of a surprise when the next prompt is generated. I suspect there is a way to adjust this. I will be reading both the SYNC and the new phone manuals.

I continue to be very happy with this car.