Taking CarPlay for a Spin ⇥ subtraction.com

Khoi Vinh’s Kia received a software update that enabled CarPlay, so he tried it out. His verdict? Kind of lukewarm:

The most prominent example of CarPlay’s challenges may be that it looks terrible, though through no fault of its own. The display of most in-dash consoles is not of Retina quality, and as a result, the CarPlay apps and UI elements look jagged and poorly rendered. That’s compounded by the fact that, even though you can tap and swipe on the screen, the performance is sluggish and occasionally choppy.

Remember the Motorola Rokr — Apple’s first (collaborative) attempt at a cellphone? Here’s what Sascha Segan said in his review for PC Magazine:

The ROKR’s treatment of iTunes, however, isn’t up to iPod standards in several ways. The worst thing is the rude awakening you’ll get if you try to connect your ROKR at both home and work: The ROKR pairs with only one computer. When we plugged the phone into a second computer, it erased all the onboard music! In addition, the phone’s memory card stores only 100 songs. Yes, we know you could probably fit 120 songs into 512MB, but there’s a software-imposed cap of 100 songs: When we tried to add a 101st track, we got an error message.

Kent German also reviewed the Rokr, for CNet:

The first thing an experienced iPod user will notice about the Rokr E1’s iTunes player is noticeably slow performance. There are obvious navigation delays — occasionally up to two seconds, particularly when skipping through songs or changing screens.

Sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it?