Yesterday Honda introduced HondaLink, a new service that connects your smartphone to its next generation of cars. Not necessarily a new idea, Honda’s twist seems to be giving drivers some options to customize their dashboards. HondaLink, designed in partnership with Aha Technology, will start to roll out in 2013. GigaOm explains:
To activate the service, drivers download HondaLink app and then register it to their specific vehicles. From there, the driver picks from a menu of “channels” on the smartphone, which map to preset “stations” on the dashboard once the phone is linked to the car. Those channels can be anything from a text-to-speech rendering of your Facebook news feed to Pandora Internet radio presets. Aha says it has 30,000 stations to chose from. Rather than access those services directly, though, all of the content is funneled through Aha’s servers through the phone and into the dash.
And if you’re planning on getting one of Honda’s new line of electric cars, Fit EV, the service will offer a few more bells and whistles like remotely turning on the A/C or heat and checking how much of a charge is left on your battery. Neat.
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