Is Entune worth the trouble?

ok, so you can check weather, traffic, sports scores, book a table at a restaurant, movie tickets, etc... ALL WHILE DRIVING.

but Toyota is worried that displaying the picture of a record jacket when playing an album will be too distracting.

 

To be clear on the advanced trim you can't do climate control or charge management unless you also subscribed to Toyota Safety Connect. You get three free years of safety connect but after that it's $140 per year.

Because of that, I never downloaded Entune or subscribed to Safety Connect. I don't want to get used to something I won't keep.

 

With premium it is a joke, I would delete the app.

 

I keep the app with the premium but only because without it, I get weird pauses streaming things over bluetooth audio. Having the app appears to fix it for whatever reason. For example, using spotify. I do not use the entune app but its there on my phone just for this reason.

 

Part of what you are paying for with Safety Connect is cellular service (from Verizon, as I recall) for the built-in cell phone. You are also getting the emergency dispatch in case of an accident. The climate control and charge management apps just piggyback on that service.

 

I may be missing something, but I was unaware of a "built-in cell phone" other than ability to connect to the Safety Connect call center. When making a cell phone call, I use my own cell phone and the various features to which the Prime's bluetooth provides access.

Safety Connect's emergency dispatch is a service similar to GM OnStar's "safe-and-sound" and something which my wife and I think is worth the cost -- which is zero during the first three years on Toyota ownership and not unreasonable thereafter. And, I believe the system will activate in an emergency when airbags deploy, using the Prime's GPS to provide location data for dispatching first-responders.

 

When you use the Advanced features (charge management, ECO dashboard, vehicle finder, remote climate control) on your cell phone, the app communicates to a server over its Internet connection, and the server makes a data call to the car using the car's built-in Safety Connect phone. This is how they can work when you are nowhere near the car. The OnStar-like emergency dispatch uses the voice service on the SafetyConnect phone, as well as providing GPS location info to the emergency dispatcher.

OTOH, the media type Entune apps such as Pandora or Slacker talk directly to your personal cell phone and thence to the Internet over either Bluetooth or USB. In Entune 3.0, my understanding is that the media apps will also use the built-in cell phone for Internet service, as well as for other tasks such as downloading map updates. This is how Tesla does things.

The Entune Advanced Applications and the Entune media applications are two entirely distinct features, functioning in different ways, connected only by the fact that Toyota chose to bundle them together under one name. The Entune application on your smartphone operates in one mode when you use an Advanced application, another when you use media apps on the car. If you are using it in media app mode (providing Internet service to the media apps in the car), and you try to use an Advanced function, it will ask you to first disconnect from the car, so it can change its operating mode.

 

Very nice explanation!

I was aware of the use of Safety Connect as a data channel provisioned by Verizon, but showing my age by interpreting "built-in cell phone" as something over which one makes voice "phone calls" to friends and family.

This is one of the reasons I have so many problems at cell phone stores when I ask about using the device to make phone calls and the sales person does not know what those are -- but can explain multi-media text messages, video-on-demand, and online multi-player gaming.


Sadly, I am just a 300-baud bear in an OC-3072 optical carrier world.

 

It used to be that cell phones had dedicated buttons to place and hang up a voice call. Now that is all embedded in the "dialer" app, varying by phone model. And sometimes the dialer app can get hidden while you are in a call, and you just have to know how to bring the dialer app back to the foreground so you can hang up. My 20-something kids tell me that their crowd actually considers phone calls to be rude, since they demand immediate attention. Phone calls are relegated to talking to dinosaurs, like parents.

 

Think about what would happen if your steering wheel airbag went off. Is the phone in front of it? The airbag inflates in 3 milliseconds. I know someone whose hand was in front of the airbag when it went off. The airbag threw the hand back so hard it shattered bones in the hand when it hit the forehead, which also resulted in a concussion.