Gadgetory

you know pandora is great especially in the car except those times when you wear out the thumbs-down button because you get like seven or eight crappy songs in a row it happens your iPods great all the music on there is stuff you like except for the ones you don't like anymore so where's the middle ground between predictive and on-demand when you're on the road that's what mog says they are it's a streaming service that mounts up on your iPhone for now in BMWs and minis you put it in this cradle right here and then it lets you do either predictive streaming like Pandora or you can do one ZT z stuff pick the exact song you want like Spotify all of this of course wirelessly it also lets you do interesting blend of sort of Spotify artist specificity with Pandora's predictive playlist now let's take a look how it actually works in this car you get this kind of cover flow looking thing which is very attractive though it's not literally cover flow now the tool you're going to wear out the most is going to be searched this is where it's really cool you can go artist album or song they've got 13 million tracks in their library one of the largest out there if I search an artist for example here come all the albums that they've got from that artist and then I can dig within one of those and find songs and add those to a queue to keep them playing or it'll just play through the album naturally in track order so it's all kind of very logical and intuitive here's what's interesting I can also say make that artist the core of radio mode like you do with Pandora say play this artist to play this song and make a playlist out of it they do that but they also let me do this I can say only tracks by that artist as opposed to going off and playing stuff that they think sounds like that artist which I don't think sounds like that artist or I can go to similar which is more Pandora like now notice everything i'm doing here is BMW i drive style not a special interface for mog that means i use the eye dr knob to navigate and select these inscrutable little icons on the left but once you get used to them they actually make sense but let's look at the costs first of all on this BMW you've got to have BMW apps it's a two hundred fifty dollar option on top of that you have to have an LCD based car which is another cost of several thousand depending which model you by then there's the ten dollars a month to get mugged at the premium level which allows all of this mobile technology to use it through your phone and through your car now how hard will mog hit your wireless data plan their mobile version streams at 64 kilobits sounds fine not amazing that comes out to about twenty eight megabytes per hour let's take the average u.s. commute of around twenty five minutes each way or about 17 hours a month if you listened to mod eighty percent of that time on commute alone that's about 380 megabytes of data well under the typical 3g data plan of two or three gigabytes but it would also probably double the average amount of data you're using today okay so it's a little pricey in this particular use case it is well done but here's what would be better done if Apple opens up the searing voice command API to developers like mog so i could see redrive the mog app on my phone and then i don't have to worry about what automakers support what that to me is the secret sauce I hope they agree you