The Infotainment System, Continued
A seven-inch resistive-touch LCD sits high in the 2013 Genesis Coupe's center stack. This makes the screen easy to see while you're driving. It's a lot easier to take a quick glance over rather than looking down, which we have do in vehicles with displays mounted lower in the stack. The Genesis' screen features an 800x480 resolution with 24-bit color support.
Physical controls below the display complement its touchscreen interface, providing more direct access to each infotainment system feature. Though we don't mind navigating menus with our fingers, we do prefer having buttons available as well, so kudos to Hyundai for its implementation. The company even sneaks in a CD slot right below the LCD for anyone who still uses them. It blends in so well that we nearly forgot it was there.
Music Features
The 2013 Genesis' infotainment system is very basic when it comes to music features. There’s a concealed connectivity hub at the bottom of the center stack, and hidden behind its flap are a USB port, a 1/8-inch auxiliary input, 12 V power, and a cubby. The storage space is small, and can accommodate a phone (even our fairly large Galaxy Nexus), but then the flap will not close. We were only able to button it back up with a small USB flash drive or iPod nano with Multi-Touch tucked away.
USB media playback is straightforward: you connect a drive and the system reads files and folders. There is no Gracenote database or album cover art support, unfortunately.
We did stumble across an annoyance while playing back media from USB-based flash media, where the system refused to show the file track data by default. Instead, the system wants to show the file name. There is an on-screen button you can push to view the track data, but you have to hit it after every song or you're stuck with the file name again. We didn't have this problem playing music off of an iPod, interestingly.
Connecting an Apple iPod requires that you use the dock connector cable included with the car, which employs the USB and auxiliary input ports to control and receive audio from Apple's hardware. You cannot use the white USB-based charge/sync cable that comes with the iPod. Hyundai's bundled cable is pretty short, but it's long enough to slide your device into the media hub cubby. With an iPod connected, you get access to the same familiar playback controls, only enabled through the infotainment system's touchscreen.
Hyundai equips the infotainment system in its 2013 Genesis Coupe 3.8 Track with HD Radio and SiriusXM. There is no support for HD Radio tagging or SiriusXM time shifting, though we didn't miss those features much anyway. However, the radio only supports six presets per band on HD Radio and SiriusXM. That's annoyingly few, considering that solutions from Kia and Ford support twice as many presets.
The Genesis' steering wheel exposes a standard set of controls that include volume, next track, previous track, mute, call, hang-up, Mode, and a voice recognition button. Ergonomically, all of the buttons and switches seemed very well suited and easily within reach of our favorite driving positions.
During our week with the car, we found ourselves using the steering wheel controls to control the volume, advance tracks, and answer phone calls, while we reached for the physical buttons below the seven-inch LCD to toggle between music sources, saving time compared to cycling through different modes.