Gadgetory

audi a3 all refreshed here at los angeles auto show but while you might think the car itself is going to be fairly basic where it sits in their model line these guys are turning that model on its head let me show you the technology inside this is interesting now 3g is fairly common in automobiles but even today it's not typically embedded and 4g almost unheard of until now here's audi putting it into their a3 you'd expect me to say eight there wouldn't you high-end car and introducing it here in a lower end car and that's kind of interesting strategy what you'll do is you'll pop a sim in the dash like you do with any embedded connectivity system and you might say why don't need 4G in a car because 3g is not a big enough pipe to run what they're doing in the dash 7000 streaming radio stations Google Earth which they've had before in these cars but now really with some good throttle response if you will it'll really load with some snappiness to it here they've got something called the phone box what that's going to do is give you a wireless connection to the external antenna apparatus in the car here's another one when this car hits production it's going to offer an app that you can optionally install that's going to let you receive a photo via messaging to this whole connected ecosystem which if you want you can tell the system to navigate to as long as that photo has GPS coordinates baked into it which you know most people share photos with that stuff already turned on let's look at the audi and of my interface down here here they've done something with rockers that kind of perform double duty radio and media on one nav and telephone on the other the knobs gotten bigger because now on the a3 it's got the right on technology the finger recognition so you can spell out a destination as well as do it by voice as well as do it by click as well as do it by photo as I just mentioned and the last thing is useful about a 4G connection is that it's a big enough pipe to create a meaningful Wi-Fi hotspot in the car you can actually share it without bogging it down to death I can't say that about 3G that we have today now how many people can actually be sharing a hot spot in the car I'm a little dubious on that because most of our devices have their cellular data built in but there are times when you need it this is part of a 4g race by the way without he bringing this in at one of their lower end cars and with General Motors saying they're going to have 4g in most of their 25th teens that arrived in late 2014 you can see automakers are doing two things at once embedding and going to a fatter pipe that's a good trend overall