Had a 2013 F10 loaner for a 3 days. Has NBT. I had a chance to do a decent (although not entirely thorough) comparison to CIC.
Naturally, each user has his/her own set of priorities, but after my 3 days of use here's how I see the big improvements with NBT.
1) Boot up speed when starting car. System is functional nearly immediately after jumping in and starting car. I saw the BMW Connected Drive boot graphic 2-3 times for maybe 2 seconds. Other times the system was ready and on the legal screen. Cool! Huge improvement over CIC which can take up to 15 seconds to boot. I sure wish BMW would detect the CA key and just boot CIC before we even touch the handle. Anyone with PDC and cameras sure knows what I mean about waiting...waiting to see your display.
2) Bluetooth connectivity speed. Huge, huge improvement. After starting car, with CIC it can take up to 5 seconds to transfer a call to BT. During those 5 seconds neither party can hear the other side. Bad! With NBT the transfer is more like 1 second. Really sweet. My CIC workaround is to program radio button 1 to toggle on/off BT. So if I jump in car and on a call, I turn BT off until CIC is fully booted so I don't lose the other side for 5 seconds.
3) Voice dialing. The natural language voice commands are far improved with NBT. Asking the system to call a person, dial a number, etc is far more natural and quick. However, I found some of my voice command requests caused a wonky response from NBT where it went off and wanted to do something totally unrelated to what I asked. So, there's still room for improvement. Maybe it just needs a better quality mic? Don't know.
4) Advanced real time traffic. I would like to be able to confidently say the advanced real time traffic is awesome, but can't because the Assist account in this car was not activated. Many of the roads showed green all the time. I understand from dealer that advanced real time traffic is only free for 1 year. After the year customer must subscribe or they revert back to the same basic traffic info that's in CIC. Service dept thought it was $199/year which (if true) is quite pricey to get a plan that includes traffic. Especially, considering that just about everyone can get it for free on their smartphone.
Those were my big 4 takeaways after using NBT for 3 days. Sure there's many other improvements, such as improved graphics (which were improved but didn't really add much to the experience), slightly improved menu navigation, ability to pair 2 phones simultaneously via BT, album art for HD radio stations, etc, but overall I didn't see any of this as a game changer over CIC. And I did go deep into the menu's and made sure the settings were taking advantage of the NBT features.
For instance, I expected the concierge features, such as my emails from my phone, to look better and show graphics in NBT. Nope, text only just like CIC. I suspect BMW is concerned about malicious code injection into their entertainment system.
The overall functionality between the two systems is too similar IMO. BMW should be working hard to take NBT to the next level and IMO they should have made more of a splash with the new hardware rather than just port over 80% of CIC to NBT. Time will tell if NBT truly turns into a stellar next gen system comparable to what you could get on a phone/tablet. I'm hopeful that will happen over time but I'm not so sure they'll retrofit older cars with newer NBT software that is radically improved. Just think about the customer re-training and potential for complaints. Some may argue I'm off base, and maybe I am, but we shall see.
Personally, I'd like to see BMW add PVR functionality so owners with camera equipped cars can record the vehicle surroundings while driving/parked. That would be useful IMO.
To the NBT lovers, yes i wish it was in my F30. Anyone would want the "Next Big Thing".
Unfortunately BMWNA decided to hold off and help BMWAG dump the rest of their inventory of CIC hardware.
Starting with July production, this issue should come to an end as F30's worldwide will ALL finally have NBT. Next step will be the touch controller. I can already see the speculation as to when the F30 will get it. Will it ever end?