Sunday 22 November 2009

What I want in a car

I'm sitting in the car waiting for my wife to do some crimbo shopping. I'd normally be bored but with.my g1 it's not a problem. I've got podcasts on my listen app and loads of news in newsrob. I've also got full web browsing.

Ah, that's where the problem start. News rob,for som inexplicable reason wants to download each article when you click the title. Yes, I have enabled offline content etc and there's plenty of space on my phone.

I'm up the city centre so I should have a 3g signal. Probably do but the g1 isn't recognising it, I'm also on 3 which is just about the worst coverage I've ever known. With vodafone I used to get a signal up a hill in the middle of nowhere. With 3 I can't get one in my own home in the middle of a city. Whatever.

Anyway what's this got to do with my car? Basically it's that I wish they'd make more use of the hunk of metal that it is. Surely it's great at attracting radio signals and could enhance the mobile signal for me somehow. Point being that when inside my car what if the signal could be enhanced by the body of the car. Maybe this isn't possible with physics but I feel it's worth putting out there in casse some one could figure it out.

That would truly make my car so much more useful to me and in turn make my life more fun. If a car or accessory made this possible i'd want it. 

2 comments:

Liam Green-Hughes said...

I've been thinking about this sort of idea too, but as a result of thinking about in-car entertainment. It strikes me that as we listen to services like last.fm and Spotify more we may start to buy less music. Currently having your own music in a car means having to use a CD or downloaded track, but what if someone invented a car stereo with built in 3G? If you could make use of the car's shell as a big antenna you might get pretty decent reception. I tried a related idea out when I was trialling 3's MiFi unit and the results were better than I expected, but I sure a combination of caching and better reception would have made the idea workable.

Colin said...

Cheers liam. that's exactly my thought. I kept the idea broad cos we don't want to tie the implementation to this years tech since cars last so long but the basic aspects of 3g, bluetooth and wifi and radio as far as I understand.