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[Vision] The N8x0 – N900 Auto Audio Adaptation Vision

I am posting this here because the brainstorm forum is a bit more formal than this post. I may pull out some of the specifics from this and make brainstorm posts for it.


The goal:



So, I have a question to those of you who regularly travels in a car. Do you feel that your cell phone fulfills all your audio needs on the road? Personally, I'm not that happy with it.

I want to play all my old and new music via the car stereo, and I want to do that without hooking it up, turning it on and initializing it every time I enter the car.


The A2DP way:



My previous car radio had support for A2DP – stereo bluetooth audio streaming. As did my previous cell phone, and as do the N900. So, that's swell. Except A2DP isn't worth the time it takes to learn to spell it. With some car stereos it will auto connect. Or it might not. Connecting can take a long time in some setups. If it'll ever hook up with quality sound, it'll stutter and skip. In addition you'll need AVRCP too; let's call it an A2DP meta protocol that'll allow you to skip to the next song, pause playback, and not much more. For example, sending the “play” signal to your cell phone will not do a thing unless you have a media player open. So you might end up first fiddling with your car stereo to connect it to your cell phone, then wait while it happens before you go into your cell phone menu to start your media player, before you start driving? Every time you want to go somewhere? Honestly, just connecting the cell phone to the car stereos AUX IN would be much easier.


The FM transmitter way:



There's an alternative way to connect to the car stereo, supported by the N900 and also external gadgets. A really old school way. Transmit a radio signal to your car stereo.
Oh, well. That's a hack. With the N900, I hear the FM transmitter way isn't all that glamorous, eh? Also, the percentage of people who seems to be happy with the sound when going over FM, seems to be rather low. And here, you still need to go into the media player every time you want to change a song. So you'll want to pull the phone out of your pocket and place it in a car mount. So, it wont stutter and your car stereo doesn't need A2DP. But again if you go through that trouble, you might as well use the AUX IN. You'll get better sound.



So, why not just use the AUX IN? Pull the cell phone out of the jacket pocket, pull it out of the case, connect it to the car stereo via AUX, put it in a car mount, open the media player, choose a song, press play, start the car and drive into the sunset?

I dun wanna. Too many commas. I can't wait for all those commas, I need to get home. Here's how I would have liked to have it.


The N8x0 – N900 AAA way:

Imagine.



I unlock the car. I sit down in the car. I turn the key. The car stereo wakes up. Everyone expects this.

But here's the thing. Already sitting in the car mount, my N810 also wakes up. Apple would call it Magic. I would call it Wake On Power. Or Wake On PME. Or Resume After Power Failure. Either way. It'd wake up.



So here we are, in the car, with a live N810 that unfortunately haven't had any music sync'ed over in years. But in the pocket, my N900 lies still, untouched, but updated and eager to serve. What Magic comes next?

Samba*.

There will be no A2DP (which you'd be hard pressed to get working between these two devices anyway). There will be no more connecting of AUX IN lines – the N810 is already connected. There will be no searching for crappy FM signals. There will be no pulling the N900 out of the pocket. Instead, the N810 will use it's wireless net to connect to the N900. Ad hoc or maybe using the N900 as a DHCP server. Within the N900, there is a preconfigured Samba* share. The N810 simply reconnects to it.

* Or NFS, or something else since there's no Windows here. But "Samba" has a nice musical ring to it. Edit: okay, so by popular argument it should be UPnP. (People didn't get the Samba! humor thingie. Still leaving it in, though.) Have a working UPnP server (Rygel) on the N900, and the default media player on the N810 is an UPnP client.

And the Media Player of your choice, continues to play where it left off. All you did was turn the car key.

No need to blindly skip through song after song using AVRCP. Instead you just scroll through your songs and folders via the bigger N810 display. And once you have reached your destination, you turn your car key the other way. The N810 would lose it's supplied power. It would recognize this event and it would go into hibernation, and wait for when it's next needed.



This is my N8x0 – N900 Auto Audio Adaptation Vision.

Yes, I know, this setup doesn't exist. The N810 can't do this. I guess the stacks aren't there, the applications can't be made, the events can't be triggered. But sometimes I wonder why not.

Everything I have described here, exists. Everything is based on working technology. Why do hardware manufacturers never put together stuff that actually works, but keep putting in useless solutions like A2DP/AVRCP that frankly isn't worth any of the trouble it is to make it work?

This is how I would have done it.



Next time, let's talk about adding hands free and navigation.

Ditch the Samba. Adhoc wifi and UPnP. Solved.

Now you just have to convince vendors of electronics to put wifi radios in everything they make.

I want a radio with A2DP in my car. The N810 doesn't have it (that sucks! and the battery drain on the testing one is a killer). My Nokia 3600 Slide has an awesome bluetooth chip that has amazing range and on my old set of headphones it never dropped unless I walked out of range which was a nice huge span of my house. I need one...

My solution (an N900 solution only) through FM transmitter:




FM Transmitter quality it sufficient for me (little to no static due to how my car is designed I suppose) and this simply requires a single push of the button in the top right which starts the FM transmitter, activates my Next button and starts music playback. It's not an automatic solution, but as close to as possible. Also enables an impossible to miss button to skip tracks.

The true solution to this problem, I believe.. lies in the full implementation of wifi in all products (this is coming eventually) such that interaction is a simply one time set up.

As to your direct suggestion, why should the N900 have to be in close proximity? Another implementation is to have both connect to a home wireless connection and automatically synchonize. Of course the issue of this is that the N810 would need to be powered on when at home, but the remedy for this would be for the N810 to not powerdown as the car does... IF home wireless is available and then for it to shutdown on completion of synchronization.

This would also allow implementation of the device with other servers/devices on the network, removing the need for a secondary NIT device.

EDIT: One last thing: Why leave the implementation up to the car manufacturers? what's stopping a USB (or other cabled connection) from the car stereo/cigarette lighter device/completely seperate device?

EDIT2: I strongly believe the implementation now is almost entirely on the software side. We have the technologies for this... we just need prototype software to show the hardware developers that there is a need (or desire) for a dedicated wifi/storage/mediaplayer device for the car.

One final aside, is bluetooth a redeemable application? As in, is there newer bluetooth devices available with better speeds and reliability?

Yeah, well I used the one on the N810 and it would stutter like crazy on my A2DP headset.

I also put in a A2DP radio in my previous car. Unfortunately the radio is not easily replaceable in my new car (and many modern cars). It would connect slow and rarely automatic, and it would interfere with the hands free protocol. This was a top of the line Pioneer and a windows mobile 6 phone. It worked better with that phone than the N900, too. Each new phone would work less because the phones would adapt new protocols without being backwards compatible with old head units.

I'll make sure to do that. For now, my two Maemo devices both already have wifi radios. UPnP will do nicely, if I could get that working on my N810.

Well, that is a usability improvement for car usage, and probably safer than your favorite media player, unless you want to skip several songs/folders. But it still requires you to fiddle around with the phone when you enter and leave the car. Which shouldn't have to be necessary. And on longer trips I'd expect frequency interference as the FM landscape changes.

That'll be sweet, but still some way off. They're starting to implement it on TVs of course.

Yes, for that exact reason: that it can't trigger an direct hibernation event on power loss. That'd be easier to implement. Also, if you'd want to use it in combination with a N900 companionship, I believe it would require two separate networks to be set up on the N810, the ad hoc network with the N900, and the home network. Furthermore, you'll have to have a bigger SDHC card in the N810 to compensate for the 32GB onboard memory in the N900, and you'd have to keep and (auto-)sync one extra copy of your music collection. Again, I just don't think it's necessary.

Either way, I want a cell phone and I want it to stay in the pocket. And I want it to contain all the sync'ed music. In that setting, the car gadget doesn't have to.

Modern cars are designed in a way that requires you to buy a new car when you tire of your car stereo. You have to remove pretty much the whole dashboard to change most head units these days. On my Volvo V50, the Volvo garage wont touch it. Of course you can use the FM device, but again, those do have weaknesses.

Wake On Power is unfortunately still a hardware or low level OS problem. It may be solvable on an Maemo device, but not likely to happen on most closed platform unless designed with it.

Edit: I have now made a post in the brainstorm forum, suggesting WOP options as future functionality.

What works for me currently, is to use the built in media player app on my 32GB N810. My stereo (aftermarket) has Aux in.

I get in my car, drop the N810 in the cradle, plug in the audio and power leads (used to have them strapped together, but bought a new charger recently.

The media player is usually running on my tablet anyway, so it is a question of hitting the appswitch key, selecting media player, and hitting play. Three keypresses and I am done. If media player dies, then I have a shortcut on the Desktop thanks to Personal Launcher. I get a notification courtesy on the now playing notifier when a new track starts playing. Neat and saves needing the media player maximised.

The headset control app which pauses/plays on audio plug events is good, but I found it occasionally got "lost" and started messing up and missing events.

I am trying to get the dbus commands to lay/pause, and FF RW to work as Personal launcher shortcuts, which will give me a funtion similar to above.

I would also like to make (or mod the existing ) a holder to slide the N810 in and automatically plugin the audio and power (kinda like an ipod dock)

Well, I'm a bit off what you try to do here, but frankly, I tried most of your solutions and they all have drawbacks in whatever areas.

I ended up with a stereo jack. Quality is as good as it gets, and the fact that it's held in a nice position in the car, screen facing me allows me to go navi, gps, services, call, whatever, fast.

To me, it's more important to have the features easily accessible than to take a short time to enter or leave the car. I'd rather take 10 seconds every entrance. When not hooked up, I end up driving with the device under a leg, I simply need the screen too often to put it away.

The only drawback I see at this is that it's possible to forget it inside.

@volt
My Nokia 3600 Slide runs Nokia's S40 (not S60) and it rarely ever stutters. Well, on my old headphones it didn't. It does a ton on these ROKR HD things... <_< only good for sitting with. You can't move them or put your phone in your pocket. I have a nice little slot under my emergency brake that is like a foot away from the stereo panel in my car that I put my phone and tablet into, with the car charger... I wish I had 2 for both.
My other one is bend and doesn't work and the same with one of my wall chargers... died on vacation <_<

And to the person 2 posts up... you have a 32GB N810? How much did you fork over for that card?

I'm not that poster, but two weeks ago, Verizon was selling 32GB SanDisk micro SDHC cards (with full SD and USB adapters) for $49.99, next day shipping included. Class 2, but still, it appears the prices are dropping.