Pioneer AppRadio review

When it come to wireless world, no wonder people get very exciting to have more convenience functions of their gadget. They want easy access of their phone with less movement, so in other word they can use it anytime they want whether on driving vehicle, working, some like that.

There's a good possibility you've spent some moment in time using an iOS device in the vehicle. You've almost certainly also exhausted some of that moment wishing there were a enhanced way to combine your phone or pod with the vehicle itself.

Pioneer's AppRadio make your wish comes true -- it looks unrepentantly like a bigger iPod in landscape mode, complete with minimalistic physical controls and a laid-back, no-nonsense look about it. Once you've installed the free AppRadio app, your phone or pod becomes the real intelligence of the system. The Bluetooth functions takes the connection way it would be, routinely pairing with your phone, if a call comes in, it will interrupted the music and so all that normal phone or ipod functions.

The Maps situation is sometimes very frustrating for a variety of reasons. Just like on the iPhone, Google Maps works, but it won't do turn-by-turn live navigation. If you want turn-by-turn, you'll need to buy the 99-cent MotionX-GPS Drive app on your iPhone. If you want to navigate your music while you're driving with GPS, you have to do it on the phone itself. You can't listen to the radio and use the navigation at the same time.

The INRIX Traffic app does provide some pretty innovative travel features that we ended up taking advantage of, including real-time and history-based estimates for travel time to your destination. The other apps available for AppRadio are Pandora and Rdio, and they are nearly identical to the Pandora and Rdio apps you may already know and love...but with search by text disabled. We just didn't find ourselves spending much time in the apps section. While a big touchscreen in your dash may look slick at first, we instantly found ourselves yearning for the big, grabby physical knobs and buttons of our stock head unit.

There's no way to feed external audio into AppRadio, which is a real shame, especially if you're the type that carries your music on multiple devices. Worst of all, there's no clock function on any screen besides the home screen. Waiting for your car stereo to boot up. The last day of our time with the unit, the iPod connection wouldn't even work! Pioneer's ambitious journey into iOS vehicle integration surveys some important ideas.

We believe the potential in AppRadio is huge, and hackers' efforts -- or maybe even software updates from Pioneer itself -- will turn AppRadio into a platform that's fun and useful for futurekids of all ages.