As long as your phone is connected to your Car Thing via Bluetooth, the calls you receive will appear on the screen.
The software update enables users to see incoming calls on their phones directly on the Spotify Car Thing. Photo: Florence Ion / Gizmodo Spotify announced today that it’s pushing through a bundle of new features. Here's what you can do now with Spotify Car Thing. For example, they can say “Hey Spotify, play cozy Sunday RnB,” and the music streaming platform will instantly create a personalized playlist from their request.įollow HT Tech for the latest tech news and reviews, also keep up with us Spotify’s Car Thing is a neat trick, but it needs more functionality before it’s essential. Voice command to get a personalized playlist for any mood: Users can now simply ask for any genre, mood, or activity to play the kind of music they want to hear. The Voice command will allow users to queue songs by just saying, “Hey Spotify, queue ‘drivers license'” or whatever track they'd like to listen to next! To view the queue, just say “Hey Spotify, open my queue” or press and keep holding the dial when in the “Now Playing” view.Ĥ. With the dial functionality, users will have to press and keep holding the dial to play or add to the queue the highlighted track. To opt for Touch mode, users will be required to tap the “Add to queue” icon next to a track in the playlist. Users can access it in four different ways: With touch, With the dial, Voice command and view the queue. Add songs to queue: The ability to queue additional songs and podcasts is one of the most useful features.
An update this week added the ability to pick up phone calls through the touchscreen and control basic media playback from other apps-I haven’t gotten either feature to work yet-but you’ll still need a phone for turn-by-turn navigation, listening to text messages, or initiating phone calls.3. (I also wish Spotify brought along some version of its excellent Spotify Stations app for quickly selecting from a list of online radio stations)Ĭar Thing is also limited in what it can do beyond playing music and podcasts.
Spotify CEO admits the company bungled policy on artists like R. While you can use “Hey Spotify” voice commands to load specific albums, browsing your album collection requires scrolling to the furthest end of the main menu, and wading through large thumbnail views for each album feels inefficient. Spotifys Car Thing is a redundant attempt to improve streaming music in your car. My main nitpick is that the interface is very much playlist-centric, much like Spotify itself. This is a lot to take in at first-especially if you’re used to exclusively swiping around on modern smartphones, but eventually you get the hang of it, and being able to switch between stations without looking at the screen is both easier and safer than using a phone. You can’t even use the device without a $10 per month Spotify Premium subscription, and its ability to control other audio sources is extremely limited.
If your car supports Bluetooth audio, your phone can stay in your pocket while Car Thing provides the controls.īut while I appreciate what Spotify is trying to accomplish with Car Thing-which publicly launched in February and received a major feature update last week-it also represents one of the biggest pitfalls of modern gadgets: Its purpose is not merely to make streaming audio more seamless in any car, but to lock users into Spotify’s ecosystem through hardware. Mount it to a vent or your car’s CD tray, and it presents a small touchscreen interface for navigating the Spotify catalog. Even using your phone with a car dashboard mount can be a pain, and smartphone menus are too complicated to navigate safely while driving anyway.Ĭar Thing eliminates those annoyances with a simple, $90 aftermarket device for playing music and podcasts from your phone.
And while Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto do a fine job bringing smartphone apps to car dashboards, in most cases they still require plugging in your phone on every trip.
In-car infotainment systems are often cumbersome to navigate and don’t play well with streaming music services, and lots of older cars still don’t have touchscreen systems at all.