Phone, car companies collaborate to connect cars, phones Eleven companies want to make it easier to connect your mobile gadgetry to your car, and to get the two talking a common language. They have formed the inevitable industry consortium to do it. Said body is the Car Connectivity Consortium, and it's backed by phone manufacturers Nokia, Samsung and LG; in-car electronics firms …
looking at the lead time to get things like Ford Sync implemented in cars - and the obsession with only making it for new models not after market retrofit - I wonder how long (decades?) and investment here will take to pay off?
I really like things like the MotoCarma bluetooth/ODB-II connectivity app and think that's a good step in the right direction, along with the S=recent "android powered" Saab concept car
Ideal solution for me is something like a 7" Slate and a car dock, and the slate functions as nav, music, eco-friendly monitoring etc when docked (and gets a power and antenna boost) but goes with me from car to office and back again (so a standard dock connector/port/layout would be useful... DIN/Dual-DIN stereo slots are a great start...
It would allow people to use the phones sat nav rather than the out of date when it leaves the factory £2k+ sat nav option that is on alot of cars. Of course the manufacturers will probably force you to have the "connectivity pack" which would cost £2.5k+ and include the sat nav anyway.
I get fed up with people whinging an whining on car forums that that their £XX grand car won't talk to the their few hundred quid phone since they updated the FW to get some crap game to work and how the car company should sort this out at once.
This has got to be one of the areas that is most calling out for standardisation.
Actually Nokia were one of the worst at this. Their Series 60 phones won't share the phonebook properly with the phone system in my BMW, and I think Audis and Mercedes were the same.
Their series 40 phones worked fine however. Complaining to Nokia they claimed it was the car manufacturers fault and the car company blamed Nokia. No matter whose fault it's pretty obvious which one users will change. For all the complaining about their poor BT implementation the iPhone works perfectly with it.
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