iPhone Embedded

Visiting the CES at Las Vegas and traveling a little bit around Utah and Arizona last week, I spent quite a bit of time with various embedded electronic devices - namely the Airbus entertainment system, the car audio aboard Jeep and Chrysler vehicles and the Garmin Nuvi personal GPS navigator. All of these systems fall short in terms of usability, ergonomics and overall user experience.

The Airbus monitors, embedded in tightly squeezed cattle economy class seats are touch enabled. The user interface layer seems to be built on top of a customized Linux environment. Is slow and strikingly basic and lacks this highly polished look and feel we all know from our personal teleputers like iPhone or Android or Blackberry we carry with us every day. There is a stray mouse cursor not serving any purpose and system responsiveness is below expectations of most users. You have to press fingers firmly against the screen and wait a second o two for any reaction.

The Garmin GUI is not bad in intuitiveness and ease of use, but looks just old... And I am not comparing it to some non existent concept solutions - during the trip we had two navigation devices side by side. One was the Garmin and the other one was an iPhone with the Navigon application. And what a difference it was... Garmin was drawing its simple schematics arrows, while the Navigon running on iPhone presented various views of lane layouts when approaching junctions, and was repeating on screen the roadsigns as we were moving past them.

The two navigation devices were clipped to the windscreen with suction mounts, hanging just above the 2-DIN console of the on-board AM/FM radio. We were actually not using the radio, just the power amplifier part of it, having the iPhone connected over a 3.5mm jack to the head unit.

Looking at this setup as we kept on cruising for miles and hours, ignited me the idea of having the entire car control system based on the iPhone operating system, especially with its multi - touch GUI. It would be very natural to have a car head unit entirely filled with a touch screen and working the way iPhone works. Single touch kinetic scrolling list browsing is - I think - the best interface to operate a multi - function on-board entertainment computer. And when it switches to the navigation functions, zooming in and out with multi-touch finger action is very natural too. But not available outside iPhones.

And this brought me the idea of Apple licensing the iPhone OS to embedded device manufacturers. I was envisioning news headlines of Alpine or Pioneer or Clarion or Kenwood bringing a 2-DIN iPhone - based unit to the market. It would be a hit. It could - of course - attach over WiFi to you home computer running iTunes, so you could seamlessly synchronize music, playlists and applications to your car as you synchronize to your iPhone today. Applications I mean things like navigation software, routes, address books and other stuff.

Of course there would be a license cost. But on the other hand car manufacturers are spending millions on research of their mostly flawed systems characterized by a steep learning curve and lack of functionality and integration. Instead they could just make an "app" available on the universal platform. The app, that would be easy to operate and elegant, thanks to the underlying iPhone software.

I cannot judge if this will happen or not. SO far Apple has never licensed their OS software to any third party and OEM manufacturers. But may be the time has come for such a move? Apple will be collecting more and more revenue from iTunes than it does from its own hardware. So why not broaden the hardware base? In the end it is all about having more users on the platform. Such a move would definitely help...