Palm Pre Touchstone hacked into BMW!
By Will Park on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 4:48 PM PST In Hottest Hardware, Palm, Palm Pre, Sprint
It was only a matter of time before someone decided to integrate their Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre with their luxury vehicle. This time around, one adventurous Palm Pre owner decided to really put his Palm Pre’s Touchstone wireless charging dock to good use by integrating it into his 3-series BMW. For some reason, it’s always a BMW that gets modded to work with these kinds of mobile gadgets.
You might have an iPhone dock integrated into your car, and maybe you even have your iPhone connected to your car’s integrated Bluetooth system, but it’s a good bet you don’t have a wireless charging dock chillin’ in your center console!
The hack was apparently fairly straight-forward. Simply mount the Touchstone in the center console (of course, the presence of an iDrive controller would make this hack impossible) and connect the Touchstone to your car’s electrical system. Props to the owner for the ingenious BMW-Touchstone integration!
Next step? Completely contactless charging units in every car…
[Via: iSmashPhone]
I installed one Touchstone into my Buick Skylark, another in my Suburban, and another in my Porsche 966. It took about 20 minutes for the installers at BestBuy to do each car. They used an A/C inverter and brackets. Each car installation cost me $120. Now I have 100% battery charge no matter which car I drive, and I use the Palm Pre as my main music and GPS navigation source in my vehicles. I think Palm just doesn’t want to get sued in case the Pre flies off a Touchstone during an accident. Otherwise, the car installations are perfect. Charging with the installed Touchstone (1000 MaH) is much faster than using the car charger (500 MaH).