| Thursday, December 8, 2005 |
11:01 - But I used my whole ass!
http://www.harmankardon.com/drive-1/
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This iPod car adapter by Harman-Kardon has multi-page ads in this month's Road & Track:
Now, the main thing of interest to me is simply that this product, an iPod accessory, is getting such widespread advertising play these days—not even a generic car-mount kit for any old MP3 player, this one is quite specifically iPod-oriented, and it's just funny seeing iPods all over the pages of magazines other than Macworld. Every time I think we've passed the milestone that says the iPod has officially "arrived" (not to say "peaked"), something else comes along to one-up the previous milestone. Nowadays iPods are becoming as crucial to the stylish lifestyle as having a cool car in the first place.
But that aside, this is a pretty neat device. Unlike most other solutions I've seen, it comes in several parts, with a controller you stick down by your shift knob, and a separate display that goes up on the dashboard. The display, significantly, seems to entirely replicate the functionality of the iPod's navigation menus—which tells me right there that whether Apple has published its APIs or not, the accessory companies have figured out how to push all the human-interface functionality of the iPod (including progress bars while the song is playing) into remote devices. This allows you to hide the iPod itself out of sight while you're driving and still get all the benefits of its interface, including artist and album names, playlist names, and everything else (not just TRACK 1, TRACK 2, etc. like in so many of the half-assed solutions proffered by the auto manufacturers themselves). So something like this not only is possible, it's probably trivial to do.
Unfortunately, this H-K setup isn't a non-intrusive, drop-in adapter solution. The display and controller aren't wireless—the demo pictures in the rather cool Flash site are of a car that's had the wires strung behind the dash and punched through holes, making it a rather permanent addition to your car. Power doesn't come from any magical source (it has a cigarette lighter adapter, unless you choose to wire it into the harness behind your stereo), and the final connectivity of the "brain" unit to your stereo is still as limited as with any other solution—they have a wireless FM transmitter you can use (bleah), a wired transmitter that jacks in between your car's antenna and the stereo, and a mini-stereo line-in jack (which it would be wonderful if my car supported—but if it did, I wouldn't need to bother with this kind of thing anyway, and I could just plug the iPod straight into the stereo). But this being Harman-Kardon, they have a wiring diagram right there on the Flash site for tinkerers, and also professional installation locations where you can take your car and have them wire the whole thing in behind your dash for you.
So this is clearly a high-end solution, and not one for the queasy about having their cars monkeyed with. As far as connectivity goes it doesn't bring anything new to the table. At $199, it's not cheap, and you can add to that whatever the installers would charge if you decided to go that route. But the most interesting part to me, the part that would probably justify the price for those people interested in this level of Borgification of their cars, is the fact that the display and controls are completely mirrored to the external components. And not just directly mirrored pixel-for-pixel and button-for-button, either—the screen has a custom layout, its own fonts, and so on; so they've got complete visibility into the iPod's software interface. That's an impressive feat if done without Apple's cooperation, and a sign of good things to come if it was done with Apple's blessing.
Not a solution for me, I think. I'll stick with my Frankensteinian combination of PodFreq for charging and enclosure and a tape adapter for audio connectivity. But that's not to say this might not be the perfect solution for a bunch of people out there.
UPDATE: Aha—here's an Ars Technica review that explains how they did it. (Via James A.)
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Brian Tiemann
