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Car Interface for Phones
By Jacob Cohen | April 3, 2007
Many newer cars are starting to have Bluetooth interfaces that allow hands-free access to your cell phone while driving.
Many newer phones also support playing music. Verizon’s V-Cast phones, the Apple iPhone, the Sony Ericsson “Walkman” series phones, all are designed to let you download music to your phone and play it wherever you go.
Why not allow you to play the music through your car’s stereo system? Bluetooth might not be the ideal link for such a mechanism, but I think a stronger multimedia wireless connection from car to phone is something that could have a huge number of useful applications:
- Hands-free voice communication
- Play your phone’s music on your car stereo
- Tag a radio song for retrieval later
The first of these is of course already available, and the second I have described above. The third would be a cool addition to a car stereo. When you listen to the radio (particularly the music channels in the FM band or satellite radio), you often have to rely on the DJ to announce the song’s title and artist, unless you already know the song.
If you like an unknown song, it’s often difficult to find that song later, for example if you wanted to download it from iTunes or the Zune Marketplace. There are services such as 411 Song that let you dial in with your cell phone, and the service will “listen” to the song for a moment, then send you a text message with the song information if it was able to identify it.
However, this relies on the completeness of their song database, and the car’s occupants being in a position to make a call with their cell phone. If you’re the only one in the car, it might even be illegal for you to do this. You could use your car’s handsfree capability, but that probably requires muting or turning off the stereo, which defeats the purpose.
I think it would be useful to have a button on your stereo called “Remember this song” or something similar (it would probably be abbreviated to “Rbr Sng” by auto manufacturers). Pushing this would use your phone’s internet capabilities to send some information up to a server, including the time and station you’re listening to, any song info the stereo is able to pull from the broadcast itself, and perhaps a 10 or 15-second clip of the song.
Later, you could log on from home and check your bookmarked songs, and at that point you would have more resources available to try to identify the song, if the system was unable to do so with the information provided.
Topics: General |
