Thread: The Post-CES Roadmap

Walking around CES and getting to play with all the new in car infotainment systems out there I got a great sense of what different companies are planning, what the market seems to be interested in and most importantly the big features/missing functionality manufacturers are overlooking. That in mind, heres whats planned for the next few months.

Hardware
Hardware design and development has begun and I am working with 3 different companies to try and get the best "inexperienced user friendly" system designed and ready to ship. I want to thank everyone again who helped give input to the predesign planning phase. We are currently working on a double din atom based design, a double din arm11 based design and a 6" ultra-thin arm11 PND.

Bluetooth
That said, I also aim to have this platform ready to go when the hardware finishs the long design, testing, redesign, retesting, etc phase. My company Domnitz Solutions just finalized an agreement to license the necessary code to bring HFP and HSP support to widcomm based bluetooth stacks (about 80% of the hardware out there). The bluetooth stack will also have support for A2DP (music streaming), AVRCP, PBAP (Phonebook transfer), Brew (older phone phonebook transfer), SYNCH (PB, SMS, Email, Calendar and file transfer for a huge variety of phones), DUN (Dial up networking) and eventually even palm and blackberry sync protocols. The software will be available for $15 as a plugin for openMobile or $16 as a standalone plugin. That price is per user not per pc and includes lifetime free updates.
Initial release will be late February with a fully featured release expected by the end of March.

Speech Recognition
As many of you saw here we have some exciting speech recognition technology coming to openMobile. While unfortunately it will not be open source it will be available free of charge for personal use. We expect the first implementation to be in code by the end of the month and the full implementation to be in code as soon as the first nav engine is ready.

Navigation
The big missing item from OM right now (other then content) is navigation. The goal when the project was created was to use navit and open street maps for navigation. Due to the required time it will take to bring navit up to the necessary level of functionality we are pursuing other options in the meantime. We are currently negotiating with a nav manufacturer (all I can say is don't worry its not destinator) to bring a low cost navigation option to openMobile. This of course will be one of many different solutions but will hopefully satisfy the needs of many users that have been longing for something thats integrated and works well. We also have a forum member turning a Garmin mobile PC POC into a fully integrated plugin. Finally we are investigating the possibility of including a waze based navigation system as a plugin (it would be free of charge and open source). Any users interested in helping with that or to suggest other ideas that may not have been considered feel free to shoot me a PM.

A few other notes
Discounts up to 100% off on the bluetooth stack will be extended to forum members who have made considerable contributions to the openMobile or openOBD project. Additionally, we may accept some old cell phones as a form of payment if required for bugfixes or to implement new features (PM after release for more info).