>The worst part? We'll have to wait until the introduction of Ford's second-gen SYNC system sometime next year. No, the worst part is the fact that you need to

>The worst part? We'll have to wait until the introduction of Ford's second-gen SYNC system sometime next year. No, the worst part is the fact that you need to buy a new car to get a clean solution to wireless. I recently bought a car with built-in bluetooth and satellite nav; it's my first car with any serious user-computer interaction. I bought the car used, built in '06. What I realized is that what I really want is for the satellite nav screen to be a secondary output for my iphone. I don't want their nav, I want to just run google maps. I don't want to sync my phone contacts list into the car's phone contacts. AFAIK, there is no way to send an address from my iphone to the nav system, and the nav UI is terrible. When new cars cost two orders of magnitude more than new phones, there really needs to be a better interface. There's no justification to buying a car because it has an ipod dock or whatever the next big thing is. The computer screen in the car should be an open API for the iphone to plug into, and the iphone should have an open API for controlling external monitors and input devices (once the hardware supports it). For me, this is the solution to pg's "iphone as a development platform". Of course, the car manufacturers will have none of it. There's a reason car computer technology is 5-10 years behind consumer electronics.