Getting online with your own car PC

Getting online with your own car PC
The previous products are great for syncing your audio at home with your
car’s audio system via wireless 802.11 networks. What about video? For auto
video servers, the market is still beginning to develop, but it’s more focused
on putting a full PC in your car and storing and playing videos through that.
Some very cool, wireless-capable auto PCs are currently on the market.
With a PC in your car (I don’t recall seeing any of those plastic traffic signs in
any car windows saying “PC on Board” — do you?), you can mimic your home
wireless network in your car, almost in its entirety. You can sync up with your
PC for audio and video to play over your car’s radio and video display system.
You can play computer games over those same systems. You can access your
address books and calendars, just like at your desk. You can even use wireless
keyboards.
G-NET Canada (www.gnetcanada.com) has a range of auto-enabling PCs
that add all sorts of functionality to your car. Aurora Auto PC, for instance, is a
$1,500 add-on that gives you just about all you’d want from your car. It includes
an MP3 audio player, a DVD player, GPS navigation support, vehicle diagnostics,
and a digital dash software interface, as well as a full Windows XP-based
PC that can run any application you want. The Aurora Auto PC sports a PC
Card slot so that you can add the wireless card of your choice — setup is the
same procedure for setting up any Windows XP 802.11 client. The trimmeddown
Memphis Auto PC model, which has all the same wireless access capabilities
but no onboard DVD device, enables you to store and play audio and
video files downloaded from your host home PC.
You can get additional accessories to boost your enjoyment of your car PC. A
wireless keyboard makes it simple to interface with the PC for text-oriented
tasks (as is common with kid’s games) and for surfing the Internet. You can
wirelessly connect to the Internet while driving by using a cellular PC Card
like the Sierra Wireless AirCard 750.
So, you can now pull up to a hot spot and log on. (Check out Chapter 16 for
more about hot spots.) Or, auto-sync when you enter your garage. It’s just a
matter of time until you can play games car-to-car while driving down the
road with another wirelessly enabled car.
Installing your car PC is both easy and hard. It’s easy in the sense that you
screw the unit to your car and run power to the unit. It’s hard in the sense
that other than the wireless connections, any connections to your car stereo
or video system might entail running wires, just like with the audio wireless
car servers that we describe previously. But after you have all this in place,
using a different application is just a matter of installing new software on
your car PC. It’s just like your home PC — after you install your printer, your
monitors, and all the other parts of your system, the hard work is done. Just
install new software to do new things.
We think that every car should have one of these wireless PCs! At least any
car that has passengers in it — you don’t want to be surfing the Web while
you’re driving.