Gadgetory

if you watch many of my videos you know me I hate maintaining separate estates of things separate collections of music separate collections of apps you know you get little buckets and everything everywhere these days on all your devices that's where mirrorlink technology may offer some relief this used to be called terminal mode at Nokia technology it's now become part of a large consortium of companies that want to basically do this let you take what's on your smartphone let that be the hub of what happens in your car and use the display of your head unit and the amplification maybe the radio to just sort of serve the phone let me show you what I mean by that so here I am with a Nokia Lumia and I take a USB cable that goes into this Sony head unit which were using for demonstration as you can see when I do that it wakes up and says aha I'm connected to a mirrorlink technology-enabled head unit it's now going to establish a connection over this cable notice that we've gone into drive mode on the phone and this is not a drive mode you can escape like on Android you can't just say I'll go to my desktop of apps right now so I can screw or not with Facebook no you are in drive mode as long as you're connected here then go to this mirror link selection on the head unit because this is certified to work this way and notice what we've got a perfect replication of what's on the phone to the screen the difference is what's on the screen is bigger mounted stable and of course connected to amplification and other technologies coming into the head unit you put this in your glove box basically and say I'm done with the phone you can make your calls here it's nice and big it's an easy read out you can have a navigation app here like it says for Drive music all of these are services will be built in by the phone maker onto their handset with their software stack and then echoed on the screen it's not a very complementary term but basically this becomes a dumb display and all the processing the app load and all of that is on the phone now notice though that none of this says that the head unit maker has to sit on the sidelines and just make the dumb display they can also put in a tuner navigation their own Pandora or all of these can also live under mirrorlink that's where you get the flexibility to decide if you want to go all mirrorlink phone centric or if you want to spread some of the functionality across to different devices now the roadmap on this is that the mirrorlink people in 2013 want to get app developers onboard I'm not showing you a lot of apps right here kind of just a few basics they want to get the app developers on board sometime around Mobile World Congress in 2013 and the other thing I'm waiting for is when can they get an OEM supplier to the automakers to build this technology into a vehicle that comes off the factory floor because the aftermarket is not where the action is anymore this has got to become something installed within factory cars they're also talking about that taking route in 2013 so the big idea here is manage your phone your media your apps your settings your preferences all of that here and not have to duplicate replicate or recreate that on what's built into your dash you still have the choice of doing that but you have the choice of also simplified now the folks behind mirror length the car connectivity consortium they're going to run a curated app presence once those apps start to arrive you can't just stick any app here access any app you install they'll make sure that they are automotive contextual useful for the driver and done in a way that is low distraction and very reliable and function I like the idea we watching it in 2013 see other potential develops