Mirrored Infotainment Systems

The visual user experience when riding (or driving) has evolved in the last few decades to have two main areas of interest. There’s the primary screen—a dashboard with critical gauges, such as the speedometer, tachometer, and engine warning lights—and a secondary screen for infotainment, featuring a media player and navigation map.

Infotainment is a portmanteau of the words ”information” and ”entertainment.” Historically, we relied on standalone navigation units that fulfilled the role of the secondary screen (mainly Garmin and TomTom). Some of these gadgets even let you play MP3 audio files stored on an SD card. Later on, smartphones assumed the infotainment role with far superior display quality, computing power, internet connectivity, and a huge open marketplace of numerous applications.

However, phones were less than ideal for riders as they’re not very rugged, waterproof, or vibration-resistant. Most were also smaller than six inches diagonally. This led some riders to seek out better alternatives, one of which was to use a larger, rugged “phablet”—a tablet with an 8-10-inch screen functioning essentially like a huge smartphone. The Samsung Active Tab S3 is one such example, as is the Carpe Iter Pad (see RoadRUNNER Apr ‘24) which is specifically designed for motorcycle usage, including a mount. These are good solutions, but they are not perfect. The units are expensive because they have fast processors, lots of memory, and plenty of storage to smoothly compute, process data, and display the graphics at high resolution.