10 / 96
Cadillacs Chat Among
Themselves
Cadillac has announced its 2017 CTS sedan will
be the first car in the U.S. market to include a vehicle-
to-vehicle (V2V) communication system as a stan-
dard feature – meaning that the luxury rides can chat
amongst themselves about road conditions and more.
The cars are built to swap traffic, construc-
tion and other info with other connected cars in
their vicinity, which in turn helps drivers identify
and avoid potential pitfalls even before reaching
the trouble spots on the road. It uses Dedicated
Short-Range Communications (DSRC) and GPS
to share road data with other cars, and can handle
1,000 messages per second from vehicles within a
range of about 980 feet.
There are some safety features baked in, too.
It can alert drivers when connected cars nearby
“break hard” to avoid obstacles; when there’s
a disabled vehicle along the route; and when a
connected car uses traction control or deploys
its anti-lock brakes, signaling potentially slippery
road conditions.
While this is a consumer play for now, V2V is
the first step on the journey to full V2X – eventually
there will be vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-pedestri-
an, vehicle-to-smart city, vehicle-to-house and other
types of information-sharing – with big ramifications
when it comes to the market for managed services,
security, broadband, cloud and more. Imagine a
mobile office app that interacts with the car. It may
seem very Knight Rider, but the rubber is starting to
meet the road on this one.
Channel
Vision
|
March - April, 2017
10
EMERGENT
You know the old saying: Everything old is new again. It’s a
phrase one doesn’t really expect to be applied to technology, let
alone mobile technology, unless you’re a Brooklyn hipster trying
to make an old Moto RAZR look vintage.
Nokia, which up until 2008 was the largest and most success-
ful mobile phone maker in the world, has decided to harken back
to its pre-iPhone heyday to reboot the iconic 3310 “candybar”
phone. Billing it as a “modern classic, reimagined,” the new ver-
sion has battery standby for up to a month, four colors to choose
from and, yes, it brings back the classic mobile game, Snake.
It has a 2-megapixel camera, but the keeping-up-with-the-Jones
aspects stop there. This is a device that is firmly in throwback
mode. It has 2G connectivity for calling and texting, FM radio and
MP3 player for music; and just 16 MB of storage (plus a MicroSD
card slot with support for up to 32 GB). It does have an all-new UI
with nods to the original and that awesome battery life, with up to
22 hours talk time. But it’s a feature phone – pretty but certainly not
smart, and built to appeal to the nostalgic among us. It has a mod-
ern price tag though. It goes for around $500 a pop.
Nokia nostalgia: remember Snake?
Nokia’s Iconic ‘Candybar’
Phone is Back