Quote: Originally Posted by
Ducter 
Still waiting..
I wanted to purchase SD since I first got into car pc's and have been watching, waiting patiently but this seems like a joke to me. With proprietary BT and Nav its turning into a deal breaker for me. I like the interface of SD, works and looks good but the BT kinda bugs me, unless I am not understanding something there is no reason to "force" us to use a certain dongle if we want to have BT working. Its a generic protocol that supports communication services between 2 devices.
If you look at the threads where the SD staff talks about why bluetooth isn't ready yet, you'll find that they investigated using a generic dongle/hardware, but found out that it wasn't reliable enough to meet their standards. I think this is likely true...if you take a look at the various 3rd party BT solutions, you'll find that they either don't support some phones, have very limited support for the features of some phones, or don't integrate well (since they are proprietary solutions as well).
PhoneCo, a popular 3rd party BT phone software was recently discontinued due to lack of true support for phones other than Sony Ericsson. I had a Sony Ericsson flip phone, and it wouldn't even support that fully (through no fault of the developer, it was because the flip phones implement BT differently). In my opinon (from reading the threads around here), Freefone has many of the same operability problems.
Even if the basic functions of the phone work correctly, there is still the issue of echo cancellation within the car environment...something that Parrot solves with hardware. For the phone to be truly integrated into the car, it needs to have the ability to be used through the car's stereo system (this is how OEM BT integration is accomplished). Solving the echo issues can be done through software, but given that StreetDeck is installed by end users on widely varying systems, it would be incredidibly difficult for SD to support echo cancellation through software alone. Most BT dongles don't have any sort of echo cancellation built in, as they are not intended for in car telephony use...so if the SD team is requiring custom hardware for this reason, I think it's a reasonable choice.
Finally, the other software solutions out there aren't truly integrated into the frontend...they may be skinnable (a la PhoneCo), but they likely still display the type of interoperability issues that crop up between frontends and third party programs.
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The proprietary use of MS MP is garbage as well IMO. It seems that, to me at least, SD is just about turning a profit on every turn instead of actually delivering a solid, working front end, thats open to users preference.
How is using Mappoint any more "proprietary" than using any other third party nav software out there? And if you don't want to use Mappoint, you don't have to do so...there is at least one digital mod that allows the use of another mapping program within SD.
Also, I'm not sure how incorporating Mappoint illustrates how SD is "turning a profit" at the cost of the end user. If you buy Mappoint outright, it's a very expensive program (>$200, if I remember correctly). If you buy SD, then you get the mappoint data included for less than the purchase price of the program itself...
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I think that if SD was opened up a bit to allow more 3rd party add ons it would actually turn more of a profit. I have run out of patience waiting. Thats just my 2 cents though.
This conflicts with your statement above asking for a solid, stable frontend, in my opinon. If third party add ons were allowed (and they are...just requires that the third party write a digital mod), then SD would be placed in the position of attempting to support all of those add ins as well as their own software. The boards would be filled with bug reports asking why a particular third party mod didn't work correctly.
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I wish SD the best in the future but for me, ack.. moving on.
Sorry to hear that...but I think you'll find that other frontends have quite a few problems of their own. The "flexibility" in configuration you desire can also be viewed from another perspective - you have to do all the configuration work yourself.
I certainly recognize that SD has issues, and I would have liked some of them to have been fixed before now. However, if there was another program that was vastly superior to SD, then I think users would have found it and be recommending it above all others. Each frontend has it's strenghts and weaknesses...
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