Quote:
Originally Posted by d3syd
Wow Paul, that sounds both very sophisticated and complicated. How long did you take to master i-drive? Hopefully it will be easier in practice.  |
You'll be fine.
It is both sophisticated and complicated, but after understanding how you work with it, it is very intuitive (despite what the motoring journalists think). After a while, you'll be happy that BMW opted for a minimalist cockpit (cf Audi, Mercedes, etc) with few buttons. It is interesting that the other car manufacturers are now producing interfaces very similar to iDrive, but they still include a million buttons 'just in case'.
I spent an hour or so just playing with it and trying things,
then I read the manual (in the garage) :wink:
It only really took a week to know it back to front. It is quite intuitive for the most part.
Menu button takes you to the main menu (or sometimes back a level)
Up/Down/Left/Right - moves you between sections on a screen
Pressing the controller selects/highlights
Rotating scrolls through lists or adjusts sliders, when selected.
Little iDrive tips:
- In any menu, moving the controller (U/D/L/R) and holding it there will jump to either 'Communication', 'Entertainment', 'Climate' or 'Navigation, no matter what you're currently viewing.
- To get to settings (the (i) menu) press the controller down in the main menu.
- When in map view, simply rotating the controller changes the zoom
- When scrolling lists on the iPod, spinning the controller quickly scrolls faster through the list (makes getting to Albums starting with 'Z' much faster!)
The voice control helps a lot too, although it does mute the audio during commands (sort of obvious) and if you have passengers you have to ask them to be quiet so you can talk to your car :biggrin:
Saying 'options' after the beep, gives you a list of voice commands available for the currently visible screen. Saying 'help' gives you general help.
There are also global commands that work in every menu, for example:
'Map' - displays the last viewed map (you can bring up specific views too - 'Perspective')
'A to Z' - brings up the phonebook
'Call XXX' - where XXX is a name as it appears in the phonebook, will ask you if you want to call that number, to which you reply 'yes' :biggrin:
'Address Book' - brings up the navigation address book
'FM' - turns on the FM radio (you can actually say something like 'One hundred and six point one megahertz' and it will tune to 106.1 :biggrin:
You get the idea...!
Paul