00:00 Subaru has an all-new infotainment system in the next generation Forester.
00:04 Today we're going to have a detailed look at the infotainment system to see whether it's any good.
00:08 If you're buying this car for a family, you're going to want to have a very simple to use infotainment system,
00:15 and Subaru's done a good job with this. It's an 8-inch unit and it's a touchscreen as well.
00:19 Everything's controlled here.
00:20 You can see shortcut buttons down the bottom for radio, map, apps, media,
00:23 and then your key controls for tuning and then volume as well.
00:27 This is what the home screen looks like. You have all of your shortcuts there to the main functions.
00:31 You can then add your own shortcuts and there's three layers of screens you can add them to.
00:35 Up the top there, you'll see your Bluetooth status, the battery of your phone, and also how much reception you have.
00:41 We'll quickly dive through these menus here. Phone. This is a very basic phone menu.
00:45 What I love here though is the ability to redial. Often with these systems, if you're on the move,
00:50 you need to go through your recent history, find the person that you want, click on them.
00:54 Whereas here, you can just redial. So that is a handy function.
00:57 And then it's backed up by a voice recognition system. That works really well.
01:00 It is better than the outgoing generation of Forester and it easily recognizes your voice.
01:04 You can also hook up to Apple CarPlay or Android Auto and that displays nicely on the screen there as well.
01:11 When you do use the voice recognition through those systems, it'll use your phone to communicate with the cloud.
01:15 So you're getting better clarity on the voice recognition as well.
01:18 This will also display your messages when allowed through the phone, which is a really good feature too.
01:22 Map menu. This is the map display. You can see here that it's a sort of fairly basic map.
01:27 It is a little bit laggy. So when you're zooming in and out, it's not the fastest system in the world.
01:33 And we'll try and put an address in here. We'll see how quick that is. We'll pop in Melbourne Airport.
01:38 Okay, that's going really nice and fast. Okay.
01:45 It's taking a little while there to search. Still searching.
01:50 Okay, there we go. So that's worked.
01:53 It takes a little bit of time to do that, but it gets there in the end.
01:56 You can also do it through the voice recognition system.
01:58 Back on the home screen there, you've got the media menu. This is Bluetooth audio streaming.
02:02 You've got two USB connections there as well, plus auxiliary.
02:05 And you also have a CD player. This is starting to disappear from a lot of cars.
02:08 So Subaru has retained that, which is a handy feature to have if you have some old school mixers.
02:13 Radio. You've got FM, AM, DAB, digital radio.
02:16 One of my gripes here though is having to go through bands to find the stations you're after.
02:21 This displays everything in one giant list, which is very handy.
02:25 Although it seems to break the alphabetical order. It goes here from M to V to A again.
02:30 So it is strange that it divides it in that way instead of showing you everything in alphabetical order.
02:36 If we then jump over to the apps menu, this is where you pair CarPlay and Android Auto.
02:40 And then finally, you've just got the car settings.
02:42 So this is all very basic information for the car.
02:46 You can connect to Wi-Fi to do software updates.
02:49 If you have Wi-Fi connection in the garage at home, this is a good way to keep the car up to date.
02:54 So outside of that, this is a fuss-free system.
02:57 It's very easy to use. And while you're on the move, you won't be taking your eyes off the road constantly
03:01 because you have the backup of a voice recognition system as well.
03:04 You can see our full review of the Subaru infotainment system at carexpert.com.au.
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