We first heard about AVIC in the units Pioneer return car at CES earlier this year, but earlier today, the company was kind enough to drive a Land Rover until my order in Los Angeles, and I checked the system in action. The main unit, as you can see in the image above, is a fairly standard charger touchscreen interface - you can use to switch between any audio in the car or controls videos you have, and of course, it has an integrated GPS unit and can do all the usual things of navigationas give you a route or check traffic.
But the interesting thing about it is that it connects to your iPhone - you can see just iPhone demo of pioneer in the image above, connected on a dock cable through the glove box. And this is also where is your iPhone. The idea of this unit is that it works as an interface to your phone while driving, rather than replace completely.
To do this, Pioneer connected with two popular app on iOS-based services. Last year, the company provided Pandora Services in the car - the music and artist information really stream the Pandora app on your iPhone, but the pioneer Setup interface controls full. This year, the new feature is a team-up with a service called Aha Radio. That the company has also an app on the store (it's free, and you do not need the pioneer unit to use it), and instead of providing music streaming, Aha provides audio signals from lots of different sources of online contentincluding your own pages Facebook and Twitter, traffic and information restaurant local and even streaming podcasts, completely outside the iTunes ecosystem normal.
In practice, it worked quite well, although the entire contents of the Aha had all the problems that you can expect translation directly to speech synthesis. While the computer read the Twitter and Facebook updates to faithfully, they obviously all out of context, and all included links did not read or identified all the (an update specifically says "Check out this link" and then the next tweet). This is not necessarily or Aha - you do should not really be browse your social stream while driving, so just reading of text is also good that he is going to get for now. But it does kind of make sense of all the experience a bit kludgy.
In fact, it may seem strange, streaming podcasts is the most interesting feature that I find. Of course, you can still synchronize podcasts in iTunes, but that takes time and requires that you synchronize your device and make sure that everything that transfers more properly. AHA of the service allows you to listen to only one of their podcasts when you want, without having to worry to get the files in the right place or on the right device. Integration of Facebook and Twitter are a nice gimmick, but I see myself using streaming podcasts much more often.
AVIC units are not good labor markets - even lower purchase you run $800 more no installation you need, and most of the premium version is $ 1200 on a good day. For most people without aspirations of major luxury, a standard car stereo will likely, and just running these applications on your iPhone is much cheaper. Pioneer unit does nothing that is not your iPhone - it simply provides a more friendly interface of the car.
It is always interesting to see Pioneer (among other car audio manufacturers) attempts to integrate the iPhone and other smartphone more closely to their own systems systems. The Pioneer rep showing me the product today promised that "in view of the growth of the network coverage" (both networks AT & T and Verizon for iPhone), "it is safe to say that we will continue to access the content more" the Smartphone itself. These devices in our pockets are already more powerful that ever been radios, so it is easy to see a future where everything revolves around content and information directly from the smartphone itself.Tags: aha radio, AhaRadio, stereo, CarStereo, content, demo, exclusive, characteristics, charger, interface, iPhone, pioneer
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