Re:GM puts an e-commerce marketplace in the dashboard
by mikestew on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @03:25PM
(#15864639)
I think you are being a bit too demanding.
Had I not previously written code that handles this exact scenario, I might agree. Hell, my iPhone does this exact thing to determine whether or not I'm driving. "Are we driving? I dunno, let's go iterate through all of the automotive BT IDs that I know about. Whoop, I see the Leaf's BT, I guess we're driving." I see no reason that the Leaf can't go, "hmm, I don't see the wife's phone. But I do see mikestew's phone, and that's in my list of known devices. I'll throw a prompt asking, or maybe that's too intrusive so I'll put a one-touch button on the screen to connect. But what I absolutely, positively won't do is make the driver push seven goddamned buttons to connect to a device I already know about."
I know this can be done because when I did work for a major athletic shoe maker, they put incredibly low-powered and incredibly dumb BT pucks in their shoes. In an amazing show of optimism, what if the customer bought two pairs of these over-priced shoes? And the implementation I wrote eight years ago did not involve seven taps. (IIRC, it was along the lines of "I don't see your usual basketball shoes, but I see the running shoes. Wanna use those?")
That's why this annoys me more than it should.
Do other cars/manufacturers handle multiple paired phones better?
The single-DIN, $89 head unit in our old VW does this better. You push a single button. (The downside is that it only pairs with two phones and an audio device.) It connects to the last thing it saw by default. The $700 Pioneer (would have to look up the model #) that replaced our Scion OEM unit connects to the last device it saw, and if that doesn't do it, three taps to connect (Settings/BT Connect/Device). Oh, that reminds me of another annoyance with the Leaf: one of those seven button taps is to decide between "Hands-free" or "audio device". <AverageUser>Well, how the fuck should I know? No other thing I own asks this question.</AverageUser> Because the Pioneer and the skeezy $89 Kenwood both say, "meh, don't worry about it, I'll load the appropriate profile depending on what you want to do. I mean, hell, it's pretty stupid to put a CPU in here if I can't even figure out that simple task, amirite? LOL!"
Had I not previously written code that handles this exact scenario, I might agree. Hell, my iPhone does this exact thing to determine whether or not I'm driving. "Are we driving? I dunno, let's go iterate through all of the automotive BT IDs that I know about. Whoop, I see the Leaf's BT, I guess we're driving." I see no reason that the Leaf can't go, "hmm, I don't see the wife's phone. But I do see mikestew's phone, and that's in my list of known devices. I'll throw a prompt asking, or maybe that's too intrusive so I'll put a one-touch button on the screen to connect. But what I absolutely, positively won't do is make the driver push seven goddamned buttons to connect to a device I already know about."
I know this can be done because when I did work for a major athletic shoe maker, they put incredibly low-powered and incredibly dumb BT pucks in their shoes. In an amazing show of optimism, what if the customer bought two pairs of these over-priced shoes? And the implementation I wrote eight years ago did not involve seven taps. (IIRC, it was along the lines of "I don't see your usual basketball shoes, but I see the running shoes. Wanna use those?")
That's why this annoys me more than it should.
Do other cars/manufacturers handle multiple paired phones better?
The single-DIN, $89 head unit in our old VW does this better. You push a single button. (The downside is that it only pairs with two phones and an audio device.) It connects to the last thing it saw by default. The $700 Pioneer (would have to look up the model #) that replaced our Scion OEM unit connects to the last device it saw, and if that doesn't do it, three taps to connect (Settings/BT Connect/Device). Oh, that reminds me of another annoyance with the Leaf: one of those seven button taps is to decide between "Hands-free" or "audio device". <AverageUser>Well, how the fuck should I know? No other thing I own asks this question.</AverageUser> Because the Pioneer and the skeezy $89 Kenwood both say, "meh, don't worry about it, I'll load the appropriate profile depending on what you want to do. I mean, hell, it's pretty stupid to put a CPU in here if I can't even figure out that simple task, amirite? LOL!"