My sister-in-law just bought a new car, which has a USB port. Yes, it has an iPod port and power jack as well, all in the consol between the seats.
So, our question is: why is there a USB port???
You can put music on a thumbstick and play it off of there.
Some phones can be charged via a usb port. Maybe it could also be useful for those usb cup warmers I’ve heard about, though most of the other USB products wouldn’t really be safe to use in a car.
My Creative Zen media player charges via USB port, so that would be handy.
Yep, I bought a new Ford truck a couple of weeks ago and it has a USB port.
I can use it to charge my phone, but right now I’ve got a USB thumbdrive in there with 2 GB of songs that I can play via voice command. It’s about time this became standard if you ask me.
Question revealing my tech ignorance: Couldn’t you connect you Ipod to car radio via USB?
If you mean play your Ipod music through your car’s speakers, yes. But any car with a USB port also has an Ipod jack (sorry - MP3 player jack) that you can use to connect your player to the car’s audio system. So the USB port is superfluous for MP3 players, thus the question of why it is included.
Thumbdrives!
My car stereo has a USB port and I plug this into it. It’s a USB Micro SD reader and I use an 8 gb card in it. So instead of always plugging in an MP3 player I just leave this in. Only 1/4 inch sticks out so it looks like part of the stereo. With 8 gb of memory it becomes a hard drive for the stereo capable of 6 days of continuous music.
USB is rapidly becoming the power standard for portable devices. My cell phone, iPod, GPS, Kindle, and digital camera all charge on USB. About the only thing I’ve ever plugged in to the “power port” (aka post-smoker’s cigarette lighter) in our cars is a USB adapter. So why not include one?
An iPod port isn’t the same thing as an MP3 player jack. An iPod port is used to connect to iPods, and the head unit knows how to talk to the iPod, and respect all of the metadata on the iPod. A plain Jane USB port doesn’t do all of that. Although with Sync, there’s less of a need for such.
My cousin’s headunit has a USB port for thumbdrives. You load up your drive with music and the headunit scans the entire drive for songs. Also, apparently his has iPod control too, so I guess you could use the iPod in conjunction with your head unit without having to touch the iPod.
iPod isn’t the only kind of mp3 player. USB ports can be used for many things, but I assume it’s primary use will be with other mp3 players that don’t use that pointless sync cable Apple and now Microsoft (although there’s is a different shape) are so fond of.
Some cars are now coming with internal hard drives so you don’t need an iPod … you can just hook up your computer and upload all of yourmusic to your cars drive.
Back in the days of carburetors, I knew a guy who had rigged a little solenoid onto his 4-barrel carb, so the two big barrels would not open unless a little switch under the dash was flipped. He used them, but his wife and teenage son never knew about the switch.
I wonder if there’s a way to do that with a computer chip controlled engine. Ferocious when Daddy drives, but he takes his portable drive with him, and it’s docile when Mommy or insane teenager drives.
Sort of a similar idea, the Chrysler Peapod prototype lets you use your iPod as an ignition key.
Mrs. Floppy’s car has an 80Gb hard drive.
You can use the USB port in the glove box to transfer music to the drive which then shows up on the car’s GUI.
Incidently, put a CD in the ‘head unit’ and it will give you the choice of either playing it or ripping to the hard drive.
I can also go to a Google Maps page on any computer and send a location to the car along with a breif message. I can also search Google from inside the car from practically anywhere.
Wild stuff!
The valet key on some high-end cars tames the engine way down. So, someone is already doing it, but it is key driven (no pun intended).
What you were calling an iPod jack and then an MP3 player jack, is really just a phono plug.
My car has the Sync option, and I use the USB all the time. Not only does it charge my iPod, it controls it as well. So when I get or place a phone call, it pauses iPod playback, and it pauses when I leave the car.
You can also control playback with voice commands, but I do this less often because I rarely listen to music on my iPod, and it’s difficult to do voice commands to pull up a specific podcast file. So I begin playing the podcast with my iPod disconnected from Sync, then plug it into the USB, then tell Sync to play USB. Most podcasts I listen to are 30 to 90 minutes long, so this isn’t too inconvenient.
When we have our car smog checked they plug into the USB port. The car doesn’t even have to be running. They just take the history from the car’s computer.
I believe it was the Chinese government who first mandated that all mobile phones and such devices should charge off USB and with China being the biggest market this has become a de-facto standard.
I just flew with Air Canada and the seat had a USB connector which I assume is only for powering and charging devices. It also had 110V power for laptops. It seems the 15V inflight connector system never really became widespread.