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After a sneak preview at Apple’s iOS in the Car standard unveiled at the Apple Wordwide Developer Conference back in June, Apple is officially rolling it out as CarPlay and will be shown off through leading manufacturers this week at the Geneva International Motor Show.
“CarPlay has been designed from the ground up to provide drivers with an incredible experience using their iPhone in the car,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPhone and iOS Product Marketing. “iPhone users always want their content at their fingertips and CarPlay lets drivers use their iPhone in the car with minimized distraction. We have an amazing lineup of auto partners rolling out CarPlay, and we’re thrilled it will make its debut this week in Geneva.”
The first three car manufacturers, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo will lead the way featuring CarPlay as part of their new line-up. There’s a whole whack of others, including: BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar, Land Rover, Kia, Mitsubishi, Nissan, PSA, Peugeot Citroën, Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota that are expected to follow suit – pardon the pun – down the road.
CarPlay is designed to make it that much easier to use your iPhone in the car to take or make calls, access maps, listen to your tunes or check messages and more through voice control with Siri or with a push of a dedicated button on the car’s steering wheel to access your car’s native interface.
Apple says that CarPlay will make driving directions more intuitive. It will work with Maps to anticipate destinations based on recent trips via contacts, emails or texts, and provide routing instructions, traffic conditions as well as ETA. You can also choose to ask Siri to give you spoken turn-by-turn directions, which will show up on your car’s built-in display along with a virtual map.
CarPlay may also give you one more reason to bypass your car’s built-in radio or CD player; You can simply use your navigation controls or ask Siri to grab content from your iTunes library or iTunes Radio and tell her what to play. Select 3rd party apps like Spotify and iHeartRadio are also supported with no indication of any others right now.
Sometimes it’s hard enough getting used to a new car. What’s nice about being able to use CarPlay is having the familiarity of using Siri and iOS apps.
Apple CarPlay functionality is free and available as an update to iOS 7, but you’ll need both the right car and the right iPhone. You’ll need a Lightning-enabled iPhone; that means an iPhone 5, iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c. Sorry, no iPhone 4s. So if you were looking for a reason to upgrade to a later model iPhone, this just might be it.
photo courtesy Apple.
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Greg Gazin is the Real Canadian Gadget Guy.
Follow me on Twitter @gadgetgreg or Empire Avenue (e)GADGET1.
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