My car is a peripheral to my phone – a pretty good one, too. The car and phone are both BlueTooth capable. So, as soon as I get in the car, it recognizes my phone (Treo 700W) and “pairs” with it. I hear the phone through the car’s speakers – the radio even mutes automatically – and I speak through a small mike above my head.
I can answer incoming calls by pushing a button. I can dial by saying numbers – but usually don’t. I’m supposed to be able to voice dial the speed dial numbers I’ve set up in my phone but that’s not working well – I suspect the phone. And I could set up a separate directory in the car but haven’t.
Note that some slightly unintuitive setup was necessary in order to get this to work. My main problem was perceptual: I kept thinking of the phone as being peripheral to the car but it’s really the other way around. When I was also using a BlueTooth headset with the same phone, it often got confused about which was supposed to be controlling it.
The car is willing to pair with up to four phones so it now recognizes Mary’s phone (Nokia) as well. However, only one of the phones can be active as far as the car is concerned. The voice command menu can be used to switch between them.
Seven years ago I bought a BMW which had a wired connection for my Motorola StarTac phone (remember them?). I thought this was great. The phone was pretty well-integrated with the both the display and the radio, got charged through the connection, and used a car-mounted antenna. Problem was that when the StarTac broke and I wanted to replace it (with something more uptodate, of course), I couldn’t because the car was bound not only to the physical connector that StarTac needed but also a modified version of the StarTac software peculiar to the old version of the StarTac. I could’ve gotten the car upgraded to the new StarTac for a mere $2K – or bought a new Beemer, I guess; but decided to forgo car-phone integration instead and didn’t buy another Motorola phone.
The looser integration and the use of wireless BlueTooth to avoid non-standard hardware connections turns out to be the right mix for now. However, the car does have the familiar white connector for Mary’s iPod which plays through the system speakers (so also shuts down when the phone is in use) and is partly controlled by the CD controls in the dash. It’s great to have now but my guess is that it’ll be an obsolete and unused connector by the time cheapskates like us get another new car.
BTW, another of my favorite wireless devices is visible in the picture of the car. Hearty congratulations to the first reader to identify it in a comment.