Canola as an In-Car Media Player
You all remember my excitement over Canola. On Friday, some new mounting hardware arrived from ProClip USA. I wrote a big article featuring ProClip’s products at UltraMobileGeek.com. If you want to see the quality and ease of installation of their products, I suggest reading that article. For this experiment, I chose the “Move Clip” (About $10) and a Toyota Yaris vent mount. I could have used the angled mount, but my Motorola Q was already there.
The Move Clip uses adhesive to attach to the device. I simply stuck it to the outside of my hard sliding case:
The Vent Mount does block some of the ventilation, but it didn’t bother me. I simply didn’t blow any air through the dash vents. Most cars will have options that do not block the vents.
I used a Nokia 7700 series in-car charger, which is compatible with the Nokia 770. The line-input on my factory stereo was in use by my Harmon Kardon drive+play iPod kit, but lucky for me the drive+play has a line-input of it’s own!
As far as Canola is concerned: here’s a bit of a video. Yes, the video shakes around quite a bit. It’s not easy to securely mount a camera in a car!
In conclusion, Canola works very well as a media player because it has large fonts, easy touchscreen navigation, and an intuitive interface. Boot-up time is much shorter than other car computers. If paired with my phone over Bluetooth, I can use my high-speed data connection to stream audio and take my favorite internet radio stations in the car with me. The only major problem I had was the tendency for the device to shut off the screen. Also, the Canola team may consider writing a plug-in API so GPS software makers can launch their application from within Canola.
May 04 2008 03:57 am | Car Video Player
