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Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX
Freshly Exhumed writes: Ford's in-car infotainment system known as Sync will soon evolve to add a capacitive touch screen, better integration with smartphone apps and, eventually, support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in version 3, thanks to a switch of operating systems. After years of teaming with Microsoft, the automobile giant has switched to BlackBerry's QNX, a real time operating system renowned for stability.
When did a "car infotainment system" become mandatory? Im a millenial, and I get that in order to sell us cars you need to make them as popular as the other thing we love, phones, but it feels like a car in and of itself is becoming a massive, distractive, pain in the ass in the 21st century. I rented a full sized ford sedan over the thanksgiving holiday and was rewarded with 'climate management' instead of heat and AC which was buried several menus into the infotorture system. changing a radio station felt confusing and annoying. Worse yet, the damned thing was relentlessly trying to pair with my phone and my laptop. So heres a suggestion or two.
Pair with Bose, or Bang, or Jensen, or some other audio company and make a damn good stereo. give me back my buttons and knobs, and for the love of god put XM/Sirius out of its wheezing gasping misery (its shit quality anymore and nothing but ads.) ditch the navigation, my phone does that better than you ever will. Keep the cool rear view camera. No one under 70 listens to AM radio so pair it down to 5 presets instead of 30.
Good people go to bed earlier.
QNX may not be everywhere, but it was a mature product when Linux was just a kernel and people were grafting Minix functionality into the user space.
It does sound like an advertising pitch, but this is accurate about QNX. The OS isn't cheap, but it does offer realtime functionality. It also is designed to be quite stable to where a bug or a hang can cause tremendous disasters, be it software with X-ray machine or figuring out what position to move a set of control rods in a reactor. QNX has excellent internal security, and a decent development kit.
In embedded development, I'd probably use Linux for most items (because it has a wide variety of tools available), however if it is any way connected to something that can kill or seriously injure, like a component on a car's CANbus, I'd go QNX because it is going on 30 years and a very mature product. Realtime OS functionality isn't needed everywhere, but when it is needed, nothing else will do.
As for Ford's use, is it better than SYNC? This is more of an opinion question than anything else. I have had good luck with SYNC across a number of devices (Android and iOS), but others have had horror stories. Time will tell if end users prefer the QNX based audio head over previous ones.
No, and No.
I don't care what stereo you put in the car. The fact of the matter is, cars last 10 to 20 years. Stereo/entertainment technology lasts less than 5. There was likely a 5yr development cycle for the car so the stereos going to be out of date before it even hits the lot. For example, my 2009 ford escape has the "MS Sync!" system and it had your typical black and white LCD numerical display similar to a 1980s calculator.
So, at some point, I'm going to want to ditch your crappy stereo and install something modern. At that point I'll pull the plug on your stereo and what will happen to my car? In fords (and most modern cars) it kills the entire dash!!! I pulled the stereo out of that 2009 escape and the entire dash died. I doubt it was even drivable. I had to order a computer, to plug into the ford plug to do what the old stereo had been doing on the bus system, just to install a standard Dinn stereo. It cost me $200 just for the stupid translation computer!
I do not want this nonsense. Fault in the radio in my car should not disable the friggen car. That's just stupid. Unfortunately, I keep seeing cars headed down this path, and there's absolutely no reason for it. There's an industry wide DINN standard they could follow. Even with Double and Quadruple DINN specs for huge touch screens, etc... industry standard plugs so you could swap stereos in and out. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from making car electronics as simple to replace as batteries in your TV remote. But they WANT the radio to be out of date so idiots will come into to buy a new car just to get a new radio. GAHHHH!!!
I don't, and in fact I see this as good news. I was afraid blackberry buying QNX would effectively mean the end of a good OS. Apparently this isn't quite so.
From what I've seen of it (I have a QNX 4 cd lying around, played with it for a while) it's pretty good software. Except for the proprietaryness and lack of source, better than linux by quite a large margin. Its lack of uptake I attribute to its pricetag, which used to be a bit much, eyewateringly so. Maybe that has changed, too.
I have a million dollar idea - if it doesn't' exist already. A radio head-unit upgrade to a real dream car system: physical knobs & buttons, and a USB & headphone input jack. That's it. Maybe even with no LCD display at all - just a power on/off LED.
Man, I'd buy one of those, and I bet a lot of other folks would too....