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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.
It's a car, not a fucking tablet.
Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.
Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.
I had a windows phone, feeling let down by the windows phone/OS comes as a standard feature.
This is certainly welcome news. My sync has had issues from day one. A few examples (some fairly humorous)
1) I tell it to call someone. It responds "The requested contact is currently unavailable." No clue what that means. I assume it is having trouble figuring out the number since it hasn't synced phone numbers or something. It usually happens if I try to call shortly after dialing.
2) I tell it to call someone. It responds "No bluetooth device is available right now, I will try to connect one." Then it sits in silence. It eventually does connect, usually after a second or two, but never calls. I have to send the command again.
3) I tell it to call someone. It sits in silence for a while. My current record is about 5 minutes, and then it decides it's going to call. That's kind of awkward sometimes.
4) My time is wrong. I tried to correct my time. It goes back to 12:00 after doing so. Now the clock advances very slowly (like, 1 minute for every few hours.) Still don't know what's going on.
5) I switch to bluetooth audio, it says it is on bluetooth audio, my phone is playing audio to somewhere, but no sound comes out. I remove the pairing, then pair my phone again, and it works.
6) Occasionally, it will never understand what I say until I use the steering wheel buttons to cancel my command and start over.
7) Sometimes the physical buttons don't work and it will stop responding while my music is playing. Then suddenly it will catch up and all the times I hit forward or back on the track suddenly occur.
That's been my experience. I was told my clock can be fixed by having the dealership reinstall the OS. That would take about 6 hrs they say, which I can't really be without my work vehicle for that long so I've just lived with it. They've told me the other issues are fairly common and that they can't help me with it. Oh well. It is a nice idea and things will eventually improve with these sorts of things I'm sure.
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.
You're an idiot, aren't you?
I remember back in 1995/1996 or so ... a 1.44MB floppy with a bootable image of QNX. It booted onto pretty much any machine we could find, identified all of the devices, found the ethernet, and had a web browser.
It was faster and more robust than Windows 95 was by a bloody long shot.
Blackberry bought QNX because it has had a reputation as being pretty bomb proof for a long time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As a real Sync user (from 2012), my experience has been that its problems have more to do with user interface than "stability". Even if QNX improves on the latter, it does nothing for the former.
Well, it might help indirectly. Every hour the developers don't spend trying to debug the OS is an hour they can instead spend on making the user interface work better. I suspect that a lot of mediocre products appear simply because there were so many showstopping bugs to chase down that there was never any time to smooth out the rough edges.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.