Oxygen Audio is preparing to help you turn your car into a shrine for your iPhone, as the company will soon have a dedicated iPhone car radio and a dedicated iPhone car dock. My cheap fanboy shot aside, this does look like a cool way to stay connected while the drive.
The O’Car is the first car radio which has been specifically build for the Apple smartphone and the O’Dock has also been tailor-made for the iPhone. The company will be showing off the details of these devices at the CES show in January but this is just another sign of how far car tech has come.
I’m sure the O’Car and O’Dock will have strong multimedia integration and you’ll be able to take advantage of the mobile data connection for things like Pandora on your long commutes. I’d also expect strong Bluetooth support for calls and voice dialing is a must if Oxygen hopes for these products to be successful.
For a long time, getting in the vehicle used to be like stepping into a time machine for technology. Sure, the tech under the hood has improved by leaps and bounds but it’s taken a while for the consumer-facing stuff to actually develop. But we’re starting to see it take off and I love it.
Take a company like Ford, which is trying to improve the already-stellar Microsoft-powered Sync technology by incorporating smartphone apps. This is a smart approach because the pace of innovation on the devices you bring into the vehicle (like smartphones and tablets) will always outpace what the car manufacturer can do, so this will enable Ford to leverage the excitement in the app space in your vehicle.
BMW is hooking up with BlackBerry for its ConnectedDrive system and this allows the in-unit display to show off your messages and it will even read e-mails out loud to you.