Mercedes has announced it has integrated the iPhone into its range of cars and SUVs. Which is interesting as the Blackbery still outsells the iPhone though Apple is going after the Blackberry market by lowering the price of the starting iPhone to $200.

I am really disappointed with the integration of modern tech tools into my car. While my car has a heads up display, a navigation screen and a DVD that flips up and out when I press a button; it does not integrate with the iPod, let alone the iPhone. Since I have bought the iPhone it has replaced my nanoPod, though I still have a large iPod which holds my entire music collection and is hooked into a Bose player in the house.

I pretty much consider the need to hook a car up to an iPod, Zune, Blackberry, whatever as essential these days. People use and rely on these devices constantly; whether it is power, music, txt or voice communication. The old car stereo is an anachronism, unfortunately, the car industry runs at a snails pace due to the long lead times on platforms.

I don't know why car manufacturers try to integrate so much into their cars. It effectively dates them as the tech changes so rapidly that an 80s car looks archaic internally. Portable technology has taken off in recent years as batteries have improved and storage for both RAM and mini-harddrives have shrunk in costs.

The navigation DVD screen my car has, while large, it inferior to the small portable ones you can get from Best Buy for a couple of hundred dollars. It may be that car manufacturers need to look at how the IBM clones came about and give third party manufacturers and integrators something like the PCI slot, or the USB conenctor to hook a car's devices into rather than the super-integrated, and out-dated, offerings of current manufacturers.
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