Citroen Mirror Screen - your phone on the car's screen, first impressions

As announced, today I would like to write a few words about a new feature that appears on French cars. I am talking about Mirror Link, a solution that allows what is on the smartphone screen to be displayed wirelessly in the car on a large home screen. Citroen called this feature Mirror Screen. I had the opportunity to test them in action. As for the first implementation of the technology, it is quite good, although a few problems have not been avoided.

The idea seems brilliant in its simplicity. The smartphone, connected to the car with a USB cable (which charges the phone), using a special application, sends the phone's image to the screen mounted in the dashboard, and we enjoy everything we like and know. Everyone? However, no. It depends on the application manufacturer. We're happy? Almost, because on the Samsung S3 the solution worked wooooolnoooooo. This is not the speed we know and like from the phone. Refreshing the screen is not that smooth at all. However, a few days later I watched the Mirror Screen in action with the Sony Xperia Z phone and it was much better.

The basic functions provided by MirrorLink are navigation, music and phone calls, including contact management. To connect to the car, you need to download the Mirror Link application on your smartphone. After starting it, the phone will suggest what functions it can present on the car's screen and what can work in this mode. I used a telephone prepared by Citroen, and there were no Polish applications that interest Polish drivers the most, such as, for example, Yanosik, which effectively protects the wallet from excessive depletion as a result of the actions of the City Guard, for example. It is an essential application on our roads.

Here I would like to appeal to Citroen (and other car manufacturers!) - if you already give the opportunity to work with Mirror Screen, it is also worth designing a place for the phone, as it was brilliantly done in the new Citroen Cactusie! Because what about the fact that my phone is connected with a cable, when I have to put it in the drink holder, where it bounces around at every more dynamically taken bend.

So the key to playing with Mirror Screen while driving was 3D navigation. What was happening on the phone screen was displayed in the car with a delay of about half a second. Samsung representatives, whom I asked about the reason, said that there will be a new, much improved version of MirrorLink for their phones soon, and the slow refresh problem should disappear.

While already in Poland, I also had the opportunity to talk to representatives of Sony. They have known the MirrorLink technology for over a year, the application has been refined and, according to them, it should work much faster than the current version for Samsung. MirrorLink uses the phone's CPU very intensively, therefore it requires strong (and therefore new) hardware.

Mirror Screen is a relatively new solution and requires further refinement by producers. It happened that while driving, the phone communicated a problem with disconnecting the bluetooth and it could not automatically restore the connection with the car.

The solution supports, inter alia, selected models of phones with Android (including Samsung with S3 and S4 mini models, Sony, which has probably the largest list of compatible hardware, Panasonic is little known from Android in Poland) as well as Windows Mobile and Symbian (Nokia). You can check the list of supported phones on the MirrorLink website. As for iPhones, Apple has its own standard - it has just started promoting its CarPlay solution.

To sum up, Citroen's Mirror Screen is a very interesting proposition for all those who cannot live without their smartphone. As a new standard, developed by an external company, it undoubtedly needs to be refined and increased in the number of devices that support it, but it has finally appeared and I hope it will be developed further.

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