MirrorLink

My faithful Subaru died two weeks ago. Fatal engine failure, starting with the head gasket, ending up with exhaust gasses in the coolant and local overheating of one of the cylinders leading to piston ring split and scratched cylinder. Later on I've learned this has been a fairly common fault of the EJ25 Turbo engines (they are reamed 2.0 liter blocks, with thinner walls). Anyway, after doing some market research I decided to order the all-new Forester 2013. What I like in Subaru is they do not have options and you do not have to "configure" the car. Like Apple, they know better and decide for the customers. I hate options and spending days on studying what should I order. And paying twice the base price in the end.

The downside is... the new car is coming with a factory navigation system - the most useless system today. I wrote many times here and I know what I'm saying. Factory Navi systems are crap. They are like from the past century. For two reasons. One - they are never up to date (2012 BMW does not have the already 2-years old Traismauer bridge over Danube in the database). And two - they do not use crowdsourcing when planning a trip and when driving, so you are very likely to end up in traffic jams.

I've been driving with an Android tablet mounted in my dashboard for more than a year and the freedom and quality of Android car apps (including navigation systems that cowdsource traffic information, like the Automapa) beats any factory system.

But cars won't have option of bringing your own tablet to the dashboard. Or will they?

There is an interesting work being done by CCC (Car Connectivity Consortium), initially based on Nokia research of the so called Terminal-Mode and now driven by RealVNC. It is called MirrorLink. The idea behind MirrorLink is to use the car I/O (screens, buttons, ...) as a terminal to the driver's mobile phone. The idea is perfect! My mobile phone is my personal teleputer, where I have all my applications, my entire configuration (address books, communication channels, multimedia). Why should I replicate this to the car? And maintain the two sets of music, apps, shortcuts, ...? Why the car cannot just connect to my phone and use it, as it is, transforming the UI a bit and hooking to the apps and storage? I don't want to have an iPod in my car and remember to sync it with new purchases. I don't want to buy a separate license for a navigation app for the car, why not use the one on my phone? I don't want to sync my address book to the car. What happens with this when I drop the car for a maintenance - do the servicemen have access to my contact list? To local copies of my messages and call logs?

Yes, the MirrorLink approach is the only one that makes sense. A car should be just a set of peripherals. Steering wheel buttons, large dashboard screen, speakers, microphone. A phone should be just docked into a car (as you dock a laptop to the office docking station). Docked via a wireless link, including wireless charging (if necessary). And we need a standard for that. MirrorLink makes sense.

And you know what? MirrorLink has the potential to reach far beyond car dashboards. Why should not your work desk in the officer be just a large screen, and a comfortable keyboard linked to the phone in your pocket? Why shouldn't conference room projectors do the same? Why isn't my home AV system silently connecting to my phone, to continue streaming the podcast I started in my car? A while ago I posted a note on application context following users across devices. With MirrorLink Everywhere (is this how they will call it?) the idea stays the same, only the way it is done is different. There will be no devices (in plural). The phone (or, again, the pocket Teleputer) will be the only one needed. It will just seamlessly hook up to the multimedia I/O ports in proximity.