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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

What's Next? When Will Technology Actually Start Driving The Car?

I know there are a lot of you that drive across the border to Washington to work every day. And you've probably heard that a new law goes into effect June 10 that promotes any use of a wireless gadget to a primary offense, meaning if a police officer even sees you talking on the phone or texting, they can pull you over. They no longer have to witness you doing something else wrong before pulling you over.

And they're not joking. You can't even check your voicemail or texts while sitting at a stoplight or while stuck in traffic.

In a discussion with some bloggers on the Washington side of the line, one gentleman mentioned the new Ford 'SYNC' system that will actually read your text messages to you, along with doing about a hundred other things we used to not think necessary. Having been apparently living in a cave for the past two years (SYNC came out in 2008), I hadn't heard of it so looked it up. Here's a portion of what Wikipedia says about SYNC:

"Ford SYNC allows various portable devices (e.g., the iPod, Zune, and most other USB mass storage devices) and Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones to be operated with simple voice commands. SYNC can even receive text messages and read them aloud using a digitized female voice "Samantha". SYNC can interpret a hundred or so shorthand messages such as LOL for "laughing out loud" and will read swear words; it will not however, decipher obscene acronyms.

Obscene acronyms?? Not familiar with those. I must not be getting texts from the right people. While I try to figure out what an obscene acronym would be, here's a link to the official SYNC site, in case you want to invest in a Ford.

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