Bill Ryan's Other Blog

Wired has the story. Unlike GM, Ford isn’t forcing you to use a specific modem or plan, so you can plug in your own modem via USB and have at it.

Ford is taking a decidedly different approach, opting to allow consumers to plug in their own USB modem to get connected. General Motors, on the other hand, offers a dealer-installed system called Chevrolet Wi-Fi by Autonet Mobile. It creates a Wi-Fi hot spot 300 feet in diameter around the vehicle, and GM claims the 3G network achieves speeds of up to 1.5 mbps. The hardware costs $199 after the $200 mail-in rebate, and the service costs $29 a month.

The reports I saw previously all stated there were some really lame limits on bandwidth usage on the GM plan, this makes it look fairly reasonable though.

Assuming the actual price of $399.00 and $29.00 a month, it seems a little steep.  Unlike a lot of other things, you can easily fit the travel modem under your seat out of view of everyone. It can be powered by an extra power jack and you can run a line into your car’s electrical system with relative ease.  You’d never know I had  a hotspot in my car if you weren’t looking for it, and I did the whole thing for well under $200.00.  But having it run through Sync is cool and on the whole, I think it’s a great feature.

I drive back and forth to Charleston SC every week for instance, and for some reason, there’s a huge XM Dead zone.  Nothing is more frustrating that listening to Howard Stern, and right before a cool guest like Snoop Dogg comes on, having it die.  For about an hour, I typically get only intermittent coverage (and that’s with built in XM and a high powered antenna).  So I’ve gotten very into listening to Zune or YouTube.  You see something or a song pops in your mind and you want to hear it.  Open up Zune, download it, and 2 minutes later you’re listening to it.  Or you hear a song and don’t know who it is. You put the lyrics you can discern into Bing, and in virtually every case, you’ll know the song’s name and composer in just a few seconds.  From there you can try to buy it on Zune Marketplace (or iTunes if you’re an iPod type) or listen to it on YouTube if it’s not available for sale yet.  Another really cool feature is using Text to Speech while driving.  I’ve been a complete Jackass and sent/read way too many text/email messages while driving. It’s dangerous and irresponsible and I openly acknowledge I’m an a-hole for doing it.  So I got the wild idea to allay my guilty conscience by using the Tablet’s TTS feature.  A new email comes in, you can just have it read you the contents.  Compared to my last car, my current ride is like a sensory depravation tank when it comes to road noise.  That’s quite handy b/c you can compose messages and send them as well using voice commands.  It’s not as quiet as the house, so the ambient noise can be a problem particularly when you’re in bumper to bumper traffic, but on the whole, it works pretty well.  Vehicle Wifi has made me and my immediate family members much happier commuters and I’m sure most people will become immediately hooked once they give it a try.

[tags]Sync, Wifi, Vehicle Router, XM, Sirius[/tags]