How does touch screen work?

1. 3G is not very fast to start with. It won't come even remotely close to matching your computer at home.
2. It helps to increase the size (use your finger and thumb in a reverse pinch motion) to make the link appear larger.

jerry33 said:

1. 3G is not very fast to start with. It won't come even remotely close to matching your computer at home.

Click to expand...

I thought I read somewhere that there is a way to have the car's system make use of your cell-phone's 4G LTE and use that for a data connection if you have 4G LTE available. Is that correct, or did I misunderstand something? (I don't have my car yet.)

Responding to Larry and Andy:

The screen is quite responsive in everything but the web. I don't think you are doing it wrong. The browser is not only slow due to connections speeds, which are lacking terribly at 3G, but I think there is some processing going on in the browser that makes it exceptionally unresponsive. I have found this with full and partial 3G signal. Rather annoying. I think the browser is practically unusable. I can't even reliably open a 110K attachment!

Re: using our phone's connection: No, unfortunately we cannot do that. I do not know the reasons why, but I think it severely limits the usability of the MMI because we can't browse through our phone and really can't do much more than place calls and listen to sub-par quality music through a super-compressed Bluetooth connection (though they have now added the calendar functionality, which is useful). Even though the 3G connection is free for, I think for 4 years, I would much rather use my LTE phone for connectivity. And it would be so simple to allow us to connect our phones through USB for music. Oh well.

Andyw2100 said:

I thought I read somewhere that there is a way to have the car's system make use of your cell-phone's 4G LTE and use that for a data connection if you have 4G LTE available. Is that correct, or did I misunderstand something? (I don't have my car yet.)

Click to expand...

You can turn your phone into a wifi hotspot (most phones allow for this in settings) then connect to your phone with the car's wifi. You will find if your phone connection is LTE that it is faster than 3G but to me the 3G is fine. I'm usually not in a rush when driving to have faster web.

Larry93535 said:

When I am on-line and "click on" a link by pressing, it is slow to come up. Sometimes very slow.
I tell myself that the signal is coming out of the sky and not down a DSL.
I know that but still find myself tapping, pressing and rubbing -sometimes very firmly - on the screen.
How does touch sensitive work anyway? I ground my thumb on the bezel as I press, to no avail.
Is there a proper way to select links on the screen?
I am not a user of cell phones, please be kind to me.
Thank you,
~Larry

Click to expand...

Don't press hard. It responds to heat and not pressure. The page must usually load fully first before links will work. Also, it is slower and expanding links does help.

Andyw2100 said:

I thought I read somewhere that there is a way to have the car's system make use of your cell-phone's 4G LTE and use that for a data connection if you have 4G LTE available. Is that correct, or did I misunderstand something? (I don't have my car yet.)

Click to expand...

That is correct if you have hotspot capability on your phone. I was basing my response on the native ability of the car. Also, some of us have grandfathered accounts with unlimited data. If we turn on the hotspot we lose that unlimited data.

Canuck said:

Don't press hard. It responds to heat and not pressure.

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It is a capacitive-touch screen. It does not respond to heat. It senses the change in capacitance at certain locations on the screen when your finger is near or on the surface. This works because the human finger is somewhat conductive and has a different dialectric constant than air.

Did you put a screen protector on the screen? That can have a dramatic effect on how it is working.

I can accept the slow response of the browser-kind of. It's very annoying, but all all I really use it for is to show a pic of my car or my Gmail, which is useless, BTW. What drives me crazy is the exceptionally slow refresh of the nav screen. Even with full signal. If I am trying to reroute my commute, it can take so long that I miss the exit that I could have used. My 7YO Acura, with traffic info, has NEVER had this problem. Tesla needs to up its game here big time.

ken830 said:

It is a capacitive-touch screen. It does not respond to heat. It senses the change in capacitance at certain locations on the screen when your finger is near or on the surface. This works because the human finger is somewhat conductive and has a different dialectric constant than air.

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Thanks for the clarification. When I looked this up, I found out that "capacitive touchscreens are highly accurate and respond instantly when lightly touched by a human finger... As opposed to the resistive touchscreen, which relies on the mechanical pressure made by the finger or stylus, the capacitive touchscreen makes use of the electrical properties of the human body." What Are The Differences Between Capacitive Resistive Touchscreens?

So I will keep telling my kids not to press harder when it doesn't respond -- and to always press lightly. I have told them it responds to heat and not pressure but I'll correct that by telling them it's making use of the electrical properties of their bodies, and not the pressure of their finger.

Bit of a side note... But can you see the screen with polarized sunglasses?

3s-a-charm said:

Bit of a side note... But can you see the screen with polarized sunglasses?

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Yes... Although if you turn your head sideways, the polarization filters on both the screen and glasses block each other out...

Not great when you are old and wearing progressive bifocals. It can be very hard to read the center stack even without polarized lenses. Much worth with them. I must look directly at the screen, which takes my eyes off the road.