Toyota, Samsung partner on car, phone connectivity Reg Hardware Mobile Week Samsung and Toyota are going to combine cars and smartphones this year, allowing the Japanese auto giant's vehicles to interact with the South Korean company's handsets. The upshot: the arrival of the Samsung Car Mode app, which will allow Toyota cars to connect to the phone wirelessly and present …
We've had OnStar in a Gm car for about five years and it's been great. When a faulty gas tank detector went phut, my wife was in the middle of nowhere and out of gas on a holiday weekend. AAA would have taken two hours to respond, OnStar got someone there within 20 minutes. We once called when it looked like we were heading into a potential tornado/massive storm when outside of 3G coverage and got an update (and alternate route) from them. And the autocalling from the car when the accelerometers detect a crash is a feature I'm glad to buy and hope I never need.
However, all the multimedia shove-in-the-features don't seem to be a great addition. We've got XM and iPods for music (communal and personal) and a $100 portable video player for the boys (not to mention iPod touches). None of this seems to be a real value-add.
Personally, I would hope Toyota would do some research into better brakes and having more room for those of us over 5'8".
It's a USB-based protocol for interfacing mobile applications with in-car screens. Think of it as a car-area VNC, carried over a USB cable and you'll be 90% of the way there. You get to run your apps on the car's display. If the display is touch-enabled, then those events are passed back to the phone (as are any physical keys).
Nokia's €19.99 application, for instance, lets the phone's rather good sat-nav function run on the car's bigger, in-dashboard screen, while also handling hands-free functions, and playback of the phone's music on the car stereo.
It's not just limited to mobiles, though - there's nothing to stop it being the display-and-control end of an in-car PC system.
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