TLX Touchpad Controller

I mostly like it a lot.

I say "mostly" because it actually works great with Acura's UI, meaning the "buttons" and selection areas make a lot of sense.

It's mostly "okay" with CarPlay, though. There's no doubt that it takes more time to activate a tap element — look, swipe, look to check, maybe swipe again, repeat, then press — but, weirdly, it feels less likely that I'll tap the wrong control if the car hits a bump. BUT, in CarPlay's Maps, the search-by-text is damned near useless (it shows the letters as one long string instead of a QWERTY keyboard, and you have to swipe-and-press for each letter; and it's disabled while moving). And if you get into a long list of items in Apple Music or Podcasts, you have to swipe item-by-item — it doesn't have any momentum to its scroll behavior. And there's no shortcut to the car's Sound settings while you're in CarPlay; you have to press the Home button and then menu-jump to get to the audio settings.

So... I kinda like how the screen isn't so close to me, and I'm very glad that the HVAC controls are physical and not in the infotainment system like they were in my '17 Civic. And maybe I kinda needed a nudge to stop using the touchscreen as much as I used to. But man, some of the handicaps imposed on CarPlay are really painful. You need to try it for yourself.

Agree that the interface for the Acura parts of the infotainment system is good once you get used to it. Acura also does a good job of giving you ways to do common actions that don't involve the touchpad. Phone calls, navigating through songs and stations and such are able to be completed using other buttons or means.

My only complaint about the infotainment system itself is that it will randomly not start playing music when I've been using Bluetooth in a prior drive. It's kind of a pain to navigate to the right part of the system to get a song playing if you are already driving. The best solution is to just unlock your phone and start a song through the music app...although that defeats the purpose of handsfree.

CarPlay is a definite mixed bag. the constant swiping is kind of dumb. Good thing is that once you get it in the right spot, you can use the other buttons to advance songs and do other things so it isn't all that terrible.