Windows Phone Thoughts: The Mini Cooper Gets Bluejacked

"In Europe, where phones with Bluetooth are fairly common, cool affordable cars are starting to roll off assembly lines with Bluetooth hands-free kits built-in. In the US, it’s a different story. There are only a handful of cars that come with a Bluetooth kit.

Sure you can have an aftermarket one installed, but then something winds up sticking out, ruining the clean lines of your ride’s dash, no matter how pro the installation is. The Bluetooth Weblog, one of our blog cousins, has good news for all you hipsters craving a new Mini. A press release has just hit the web revealing (as often happens) that the new Mini Coopers will have a hands-free Bluetooth with noise canceling technology."

The press release: "Clarity Technologies’ proprietary software suite includes multi-award- winning voice extraction and echo-cancellation software that adapts itself while capturing the voice of interest from background sounds (including other voices). This state-of-the-art technology is far more advanced than the more common noise cancellation approaches that simply suppress noise components. This makes the voice more intelligible to the human ear, more recognizable to computers and optimizes vocoders telecommunication devices and networks."

I'm not sure that I'm a "hipster", but I'm finding the Mini more and more attractive - maybe enough to get one instead of a VW Golf V when the lease on my GTI is up. :mrgreen: But that's beside the point. I think it's pretty cool that wireless is making its way into cars. The BT here is obviously meant for phone use, but the "creep" of BT in cars puts one of my personal dreams closer to reality - a built-in WiFi AP and storage brick. :cool:

What do you think? Is wireless in cars useful?