Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX 233
Freshly Exhumed writes: Ford's in-car infotainment system known as Sync will soon evolve to add a capacitive touch screen, better integration with smartphone apps and, eventually, support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in version 3, thanks to a switch of operating systems. After years of teaming with Microsoft, the automobile giant has switched to BlackBerry's QNX, a real time operating system renowned for stability.
Good news (Score:3)
And if the they make it Android/iOS agnostic, with proper support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, its even better news.
Of course, both windows phone users must be feeling let down by now...
Re:Good news (Score:5, Funny)
I had a windows phone, feeling let down by the windows phone/OS comes as a standard feature.
Great. More touchscreens. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a car, not a fucking tablet.
Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.
Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.
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Completely agree. We're throwing tech into these cars for the sake of tech.. not functionality.
Re:Great. More touchscreens. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ditto. I don't want a car media interface. I want dedicated physical buttons & knobs for the climate, radio volume & input selection.
And a place on the dash to mount my own phone/tablet with a nearby USB plug.
I have never seen an electronic car interface that was any good at all, and that includes every navigation system I've ever seen. My phone has better navigation (Waze rocks), better audio, and a better interface than anything a can manufacturer could ever try to copy.
I only upgrade my car every 10+ years - an even then it might not be a new car. Hey Detroit - stop trying. Give up. Let Apple/Android/[new startup] give me the tech I want. If you want to get fancy, give the phone a read-only API to the car's status.
Re:Great. More touchscreens. (Score:4, Informative)
Or, better yet, Auto Industry, come up with a "standard" that we can "upgrade" our systems quickly and easily. Nothing worse than driving a ten year old car with outdated technology, because Auto companies want some sort of lock in for their "customers". (quotes added because I know the auto industry is incapable of getting their heads out of their asses long enough care about their customers).
1) Your customers are the first people that buy a car, not everyone that ever owns that car afterwards. Most cars have multiple owners and pissing on them with proprietary components for the sake of proprietary lock in is stupid. First company that comes up with and uses a Standard will have a cult following.
2) You are saying, via lock in, that you really don't care what your ten year old branded car's technology is. Nothing like saying "You have a tape player, that is what you have, that is what you get, you can't upgrade" to everyone that owns you branded vehicle simply because you all couldn't figure out how to build a deck slot for car radios.
3) I have a number of very easy ideas on how to provide upgradable technology slots that would simply make your branded vehicles much more enticing 5 years down the road. You do expect your cars to last that long and represent your brand that long ... right?
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You're joking, right?
I'm sorry, but as cool of an idea it is, it's completely laughable.
They view these things as differentiating features and competitive advantages. They also make huge amounts of money on the upgrades and the bells and whistles.
Not gonna happen, as much as we'd like to see it.
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"They also make huge amounts of money on the upgrades and the bells and whistles."
I would love to see actual evidence of this, beyond marketing's interpretation of the data. I sold cars, and for the most part, people who wanted to upgrade the audio system didn't do it at the dealership. Further, most people took whatever the audio system was that was in the car that they wanted, even it it wasn't what they really would have chosen.
IMHO, making it difficult to upgrade audio with the whole "integrated dash sy
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What, that car manufacturers have treated upgrades and options as a cash cow for decades? Really? OnStar alone [autonews.com] makes GM hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. You don't think getting your infotainment system on a subscription would be lucrative???
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And then they will eventually go bankrupt anyways because instead of making good cars, with options people actually want, the spend stupid amounts of money on installing services (like OnStar) into every vehicle "standard", which most people don't want to pay $17.95 - 70.00 month. Hey, guess what, OnStar is now mostly useless for all but emergency cases (automatic activation upon accident) because we have these things called smartphones.
And for all the profitability of OnStar, it didn't help GM from being b
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LOL, I'm not disagreeing with you.
But, seriously, companies are now expected to keep growing quarterly, or they're seen as stagnating by the stock market.
In order to keep executive compensation at all time highs, they need to implement the full set of MBA approved gibberish, so that the analysts tout how awesome their stock is.
The stock market doesn't reward
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But, seriously, companies are now expected to keep growing quarterly, or they're seen as stagnating by the stock market.
In mature markets, growth slows. This is normal. It is unreasonable to have unreasonable expectations of fast growth in markets that are mature. And companies chasing after unreasonable growth tend end up failing.
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Back in ye olden days, it was actually reasonably likely that the entertainment system was a DIN-mount box with some obnoxious-but-more-or-less-functional bundle of wiring harness that connected it to to the vehicle. Less so today, and(even when that's still physically the case) more likely that it isn't just power and analog audio; but a whole bunch of actively hostile and undocumented CAN chatter that disables a bunch of random cabin systems
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There is a standard, it's called DIN. Unfortunately, people want these silly swooping dashes and feel like a rectangular radio slot just won't do. Fortunately, you can usually buy a new piece of dash that provides a DIN shaped hole. Pull the old radio out, put the dash piece on, and you're ready to pop in a DIN sized radio.
It's still the standard and it's almost all you can buy in aftermarket radios. Occasionally a company will make an aftermarket radio that isn't DIN for a specific car, but it's rare.
T
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DIN is a physical format standard. This does nothing for the octopus connector, which is not a standard.
And unlike DIN, current in dash SYNC style displays do not have a standard. And now that Sync is no longer going to be supported, in 5 years, all those nifty consoles may just be worthless. They are barely cute toys today, and compared to the Android / iDevice options that are currently out there they suck.
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Nothing like saying "You have a tape player, that is what you have, that is what you get, you can't upgrade"
Actually, I got that when I bought my current car, new, from the dealer. I got the version with the 4 cyl engine and the "comfort option package". When I asked to upgrade the CD-only radio to one with both CD and tape, I was told that that was only available for versions with the 6 cyl engine. I then said "Well, you have replacement units for service, why not just "service" my radio by replacing it with the better unit?" They said the OEM does not allow them to do that.
Admittedly, it would have cost more th
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Tape decks are good! Cassette line-in adapters work much better than those damn radio transmitter ones you have to use if your head unit only accepts CDs.
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buttons are expensive and can't be reconfigured on the fly.
If true, this sounds like the most important reason why buttons are better than touch-screens in dashboards. Don't you hate it when you try to raise the volume and accidentally activate the passenger seat ejector instead?
Re:Great. More touchscreens. (Score:4, Informative)
buttons are expensive and can't be reconfigured on the fly.
Someone better tell BMW that, then.
Mine has a row of buttons 1-6 that can be reassigned to whatever is on the screen by holding it in for a couple of seconds. So for me, 1 means "Take me home" and 3 means "NIght view on/off". Handy, and especially so because they're physical buttons, right next to my fingertips on the gear shift.
Operating a touch screen, on the other hand, requires you actually looking and stretching. Not good.
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Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.
Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.
So why'd you buy it then?
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Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
For some reason auto manufactures think we all want nifty touch screens - and consumers now don't have a choice.
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Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
Actually, yes, I have. The Volvo V70 is pretty nice and has physical buttons (along with a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff), so does the Mazda 3, even a Dodge Charger rental I drove a few years ago was like that, having a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff and physical buttons for the commonly-used stuff. It's a good balance; the touchscreen gives you the ability to have a lot of fun
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Yep, I've tried out Audis with knobs and buttons for the navigation, but those suck actually. They're much clumsier to use than a touchscreen, since you have to fumble around with a big knob just to select each letter for the name of your destination; it's completely stupid. Knobs for HVAC and radio controls (the often-used ones, like volume, etc.) are very sensible; knobs to type in letters is asinine.
However, ALL car navigation systems are idiotic, because they're all 5 years behind the times by the tim
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That must be a recent development; the Audis I was looking at about 3 years ago had some horrible, clunky nav system.
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Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
Yep. Bought a Honda Insight this year. Unlike the Prius, it has all physical buttons.
Sadly, the Prius dominates that market segment, and the Insight is being discontinued.
Re: Great. More touchscreens. (Score:2)
My Jeep has a QNX based touchscreen that is very responsive and fast and reliable, plus it had physical knobs, switches and buttons for climate control and radio as a backup. The backup radio controls are on the steering wheel. I can change the station or audio track, adjust the volume and answer or make handsfree calls and use cruise control without taking hands off the steering wheel. Climate control knobs are logical and nicely sized so they can be operated without taking eyes off the road.
The Ford Explo
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This is why I tend to prefer buying former rental cars. One owner who at least changed the oil and a weird set of options that includes things like power windows but generally excludes everything else and has cloth seats. Simpler, very little to go wrong. They don't always offer that combination of options to the general public.
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Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
For some reason auto manufactures think we all want nifty touch screens - and consumers now don't have a choice.
there are plenty of used cars with physical knobs in need of good homes. http://www.carmax.com/ [carmax.com]
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Because despite the touch screen, i really like the car. Overall it is really a pretty minor gripe -- I just don't like the direction the auto industry is headed in the entertainment department.
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Have you seen the other brands versions of the same thing? Functionally the same
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No, I haven't seen anything of the sort. I've only seen the all-touchscreen idiocy from Ford (and its other monikers Lincoln and Mercury); the other carmakers seem to have somewhat-intelligent people working for them who move the most-used functions to actual buttons and knobs, even if there is a touchscreen there.
Actually, I believe Hyundai might have some models with the all-touchscreen idiocy, but still, 2 carmakers does not equal "all".
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What are you listening to on XM that is 'nothing but ads'? I have been listening to XM for over a decade in both cars and at home (mostly rock/jazz/classical) and I have yet to hear an ad.
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I have to agree that XM is full of ads. Almost every station has an announcer talking after every second song announcing something or other. It may not be full fledged ads as in traditional radio but I wish that they would just shut up and play music. Someone promoting something is an ad for me.
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Broadcast radio is 'full of ads'. As in, a LARGE percentage of the time is spent trying to get you to purchase some product or other, often in the most obnoxious way possible.
XM does have some announcments. Nowhere nearly as frequent as 'every other song', usually I'll hear one or two announcements during my 1/2 hour commute, and those announcements generally are less than 5 seconds long. XMs announcements tend to be 'if you want to hear more of that artist, switch to channel x'. I guess if you are desp
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Nothing but ads? I never hear ads on Sirius.
QNX is great... (Score:2)
And if it were still a standalone company, I'd find no surprises here. But I'm not sure I'd want to go after *anything* that's under the umbrella of Blackberry right now. In Ford's shoes, I'd've probably just gone with some embedded Linux and called it a day. Unless, of course, they were able to get Blackberry to give them one of those, "You go under, we get the source code" clauses.
Welcome news (Score:5, Informative)
This is certainly welcome news. My sync has had issues from day one. A few examples (some fairly humorous)
1) I tell it to call someone. It responds "The requested contact is currently unavailable." No clue what that means. I assume it is having trouble figuring out the number since it hasn't synced phone numbers or something. It usually happens if I try to call shortly after dialing.
2) I tell it to call someone. It responds "No bluetooth device is available right now, I will try to connect one." Then it sits in silence. It eventually does connect, usually after a second or two, but never calls. I have to send the command again.
3) I tell it to call someone. It sits in silence for a while. My current record is about 5 minutes, and then it decides it's going to call. That's kind of awkward sometimes.
4) My time is wrong. I tried to correct my time. It goes back to 12:00 after doing so. Now the clock advances very slowly (like, 1 minute for every few hours.) Still don't know what's going on.
5) I switch to bluetooth audio, it says it is on bluetooth audio, my phone is playing audio to somewhere, but no sound comes out. I remove the pairing, then pair my phone again, and it works.
6) Occasionally, it will never understand what I say until I use the steering wheel buttons to cancel my command and start over.
7) Sometimes the physical buttons don't work and it will stop responding while my music is playing. Then suddenly it will catch up and all the times I hit forward or back on the track suddenly occur.
That's been my experience. I was told my clock can be fixed by having the dealership reinstall the OS. That would take about 6 hrs they say, which I can't really be without my work vehicle for that long so I've just lived with it. They've told me the other issues are fairly common and that they can't help me with it. Oh well. It is a nice idea and things will eventually improve with these sorts of things I'm sure.
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My Sync is terrible at voice control. We were visiting friends at a city we hadn't been at before, and they took us to dinner someplace near the state's Capitol building. We decided we wanted to go back the next day for sight seeing. I repeatedly tried asking it variations of "Find capitol building, find capitol, find state capitol", etc. It replied a bunch of random things like "Finding carpet cleaners", "finding shopping", and "finding pizza." (?) Actually, the last one sort-of helped, because I remem
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I was told my clock can be fixed by having the dealership reinstall the OS. That would take about 6 hrs they say, which I can't really be without my work vehicle for that long so I've just lived with it.
My wife's car has an older version of Sync, and I can update it myself [ford.com] by downloading a file to a USB drive and plugging it into the car. It took less than an hour. For some reason, dealer mechanics can't do anything computer related in less than a day.
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Sounds very similar to the gripes I have about the Microsoft GUI on my Uverse "cable" box / DVR.
Welcome to the Windows Airline (Score:2)
I'm dating myself, but...
Windows [3.1] Airline ~ The airport terminal is nice and brashly colorful with friendly stewards, easy access to the plane, an uneventful takeoff ... then the plane blows up without any warning whatsoever.
Fly NT ~ Everyone marches out onto the runway, says the password in unison, and forms the outline of an airplane. Then they all sit down and make a whooshing sound like they're flying.
Windows Airline 95 ~ Windows Airline customers are bused to a new terminal at the far end of the a
"HAL - Play Genre Rock" (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm sorry Dave, I've BSOD'd... my mind... I can feel it going... I... I'm afraid I... qw30@#$%*(@#$... You seem to be trying to drive a car... How can I help?"
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"I'll be back!"
Thank God (Score:2)
It is about freaking time.
um (Score:4, Interesting)
No, and No.
I don't care what stereo you put in the car. The fact of the matter is, cars last 10 to 20 years. Stereo/entertainment technology lasts less than 5. There was likely a 5yr development cycle for the car so the stereos going to be out of date before it even hits the lot. For example, my 2009 ford escape has the "MS Sync!" system and it had your typical black and white LCD numerical display similar to a 1980s calculator.
So, at some point, I'm going to want to ditch your crappy stereo and install something modern. At that point I'll pull the plug on your stereo and what will happen to my car? In fords (and most modern cars) it kills the entire dash!!! I pulled the stereo out of that 2009 escape and the entire dash died. I doubt it was even drivable. I had to order a computer, to plug into the ford plug to do what the old stereo had been doing on the bus system, just to install a standard Dinn stereo. It cost me $200 just for the stupid translation computer!
I do not want this nonsense. Fault in the radio in my car should not disable the friggen car. That's just stupid. Unfortunately, I keep seeing cars headed down this path, and there's absolutely no reason for it. There's an industry wide DINN standard they could follow. Even with Double and Quadruple DINN specs for huge touch screens, etc... industry standard plugs so you could swap stereos in and out. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from making car electronics as simple to replace as batteries in your TV remote. But they WANT the radio to be out of date so idiots will come into to buy a new car just to get a new radio. GAHHHH!!!
Got out of Ford (Score:2)
Re:Got out of Ford (Score:5, Funny)
Given that the stock price went from $2 in 2009 to $15 today, they were thinking they were smarter than you. Apparently they were right.
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$1,000,000 idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a million dollar idea - if it doesn't' exist already. A radio head-unit upgrade to a real dream car system: physical knobs & buttons, and a USB & headphone input jack. That's it. Maybe even with no LCD display at all - just a power on/off LED.
Man, I'd buy one of those, and I bet a lot of other folks would too....
Notes from a real Sync user (Score:2)
As a real Sync user (from 2012), my experience has been that its problems have more to do with user interface than "stability". Even if QNX improves on the latter, it does nothing for the former. The main problems are:
- The user interface for navigating features isn't very intuitive
- It relies too much on a voice recognition system that doesn't really work well. Either make that work well (a hard problem) or don't rely on it so much (an easy problem).
Oh, and regarding the problem playing from a USB stick
Re:Notes from a real Sync user (Score:5, Insightful)
As a real Sync user (from 2012), my experience has been that its problems have more to do with user interface than "stability". Even if QNX improves on the latter, it does nothing for the former.
Well, it might help indirectly. Every hour the developers don't spend trying to debug the OS is an hour they can instead spend on making the user interface work better. I suspect that a lot of mediocre products appear simply because there were so many showstopping bugs to chase down that there was never any time to smooth out the rough edges.
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Purchase Decisions (Score:2)
Geesh, so many posts where people are talking about Ford selling more cars because of this or even stating they might consider buying one themselves.
Remember when we chose our vehicles because of their qualities as a vehicle?
Remember when every dashboard had standard sized holes for the radio and stock radios where crap that almost everyone replaced?
I'd rather buy a vehicle that drives well and has a nice double-din hole where I can mount a head unit of my choice. I want to buy the car (or truck) based sole
A good sign (Score:3)
and Bad News (Score:2)
On my flagship every-bell-and-whistle edition I have been frustrated many times. When I bought the newest one, it was to replace a car with an 8 year old Toyota system. Before I bought it, I saw that it wasn't as polished and easy to use as my old one (partly since I was familiar with it, I'm sure). The Navigation, in particular, was pretty uneven: a couple of things better (able to do limited route setup while underway, for example), and some
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Now the ultimate insult. Ford acknowledges that their system was... poor. They announce a much-better version (they hope).
And it is NOT AVAILABLE to those of us who have put up with the one they had.
Come on. QNX runs on nearly anything. Are they seriously unable to upgrade the existing hardware? Really?
If enough owners told Ford that their next car would be a GM unless they got Microsoft the hell out of their consoles, Ford might do something. Especially if it made the news.
It might need something as simple as a youtube rant going viral. Stinks I know, but that's how things work these days.
Praise the lord (Score:2)
Here I thought I'd have to hang onto my 2003 Ford for the rest of my life, rather than buy a vehicle controlled by Microsoft products. What a relief.
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You don't *have* to only buy Ford you know.
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:4, Funny)
sync unintuitive (Score:2)
a friend hasn't figured out how to pair her phone to her focus yet, so i'd say sync's unintuitive...
this is good news 4 ford...i may now consider buying one;-)
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I can attest to the unintuitive nature of the settings on the Sync system. Pairing your Bluetooth device is indeed a challenge.
They must have regressed something, as the 2011 Sync is easy.
The "Phone" screen has a "Devices" button, and you click "Add", then have your phone scan. Enter the PIN from the car on the phone, and you're paired.
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My old Ford had Sync and it it was slow, froze occasionally and would reboot (for maintenance) every couple hundred hours of operation. Connecting a phone to it wasn't difficult, but it's auto-sync of music was frustrating - you had to wait for several minutes before the system could play. It always felt like it was in continual beta mode. The first versions were so bad Ford sent everyone a free USB dongle to upgrade it rather than just make it available to download like other updates.
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft actually had very little to do with the MyTouch system which was the second generation Sync system. Microsoft helped make the original Sync system which for 2007 was actually quite reasonable. For the second generation released in 2010 that was the one that Ford essentially had to rewrite internally to fix, that was done by BSquare -- admittedly that company was made of former Microsoft people and ran on Microsoft's Auto Platform.
The point is however blaming Microsoft for the interface they didn't have anything to do with is like blaming kernel maintainers for Gnome doing something stupid in their interface.
QNX is a great choice of an OS for a fairly fixed ecosystem of hardware where reliability is paramount, but just because the OS is good doesn't mean the interface will be.
Re: Riiiiight. (Score:4, Informative)
The focus I rented with sync was horrible.
To use ad2p audio, I had to connect the phone, and would get a message "to play music through Bluetooth, go to audio settings". There we're two audio settings headings, one two levels deep, the other three levels deep, and I could never remember which one to go to, or what the path to it was.
It would forget this setting every time I restarted the car.
The setting forgetting, the two menu items with same name, and the message telling me where to go leaving out the path to get there are all thing's I would consider terrible ui design.
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The only feature I have but can't use is the speak-to-text feature; I assume that's a Windows Phone only feature. I also don't like how the vehicle reports in maintenance checks. Instead of using my phone's internet capability it makes a phonecall instead.
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quite a few cisco routers (not the junk plastic home routers) run qnx, too, btw.
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, QNX has been around for a long time.
\What most people don't get is what a realtime OS is, and why it matters. Other multitasking OSes are generally "best-effort" OSes, but in a realtime OS, the whole scheduling system is based on giving guarantees, making sure that things happen within a certain time frame or a certain order.
The overhead is huge, which is why you don't se RT on any normal desktops or servers, but in something like a car, airplane or hospital device, you would rather know that 100% of the requests get served in 100 ms, than having an average time of 10 ms, but a worst case time of 1000+ ms.
If you know the worst case, you can program your systems to operate within them.
Linux does have a RT version, in part supported by Ingo Molnar and Theodore Ts'o, but it does not see heavy use. In part, this has been because for a realtime OS to be successful, all the parts have to play ball, not just some. And in part it is because a realtime OS is quite a bit slower on average, and most regular users would rather have improved average speeds than improved worst-case.
But for a car? Give me a realtime OS any day. I don't want traction control to cut in a tenth of a second too late because the kernel was busy doing garbage collection, time synchronization, and handling an urgent warning that the oil temperature was too high.
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You are very correct re. the difference between a RT operating system and not RT. That has nothing to do with Sync specifically or infotainment in general.
Sync does not have any control over engine management, traction control or any other safety critical system (and neither does any other infotainment system). Not sure about Sync, but typically you cannot even update safety critical systems from the infotainment system. An infotainment system may have read-only access to report "interesting" data, but th
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Not really, the actual requirement is that nothing can block a real time process, which I believe the linux real time patches do in fact achieve quite reliably.
And there is where "play ball" comes in.
For example, xfs is, as far as I can tell, the only file system for Linux that supports realtime, and even that took about a decade to be ported from SGI to Linux. If you need to have your commit done within a certain time span, it doesn't help much if the OS can't fulfill that because it has to do a callout to a device that isn't rt capable.
Similar for IO devices - Serial and Firewire can play ball, but USB cannot. Most HDDs with a fixed rotational speed can, and w
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Huh? I'd say THE choice for realtime embedded operating systems is probably vxWorks.
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I don't, and in fact I see this as good news. I was afraid blackberry buying QNX would effectively mean the end of a good OS. Apparently this isn't quite so.
From what I've seen of it (I have a QNX 4 cd lying around, played with it for a while) it's pretty good software. Except for the proprietaryness and lack of source, better than linux by quite a large margin. Its lack of uptake I attribute to its pricetag, which used to be a bit much, eyewateringly so. Maybe that has changed, too.
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're an idiot, aren't you?
I remember back in 1995/1996 or so ... a 1.44MB floppy with a bootable image of QNX. It booted onto pretty much any machine we could find, identified all of the devices, found the ethernet, and had a web browser.
It was faster and more robust than Windows 95 was by a bloody long shot.
Blackberry bought QNX because it has had a reputation as being pretty bomb proof for a long time.
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Oh come on, Windows 95? The OS that couldn't even sit idle without eventually crashing? That's a real low bar.
I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs. It may be secure, but it's actually not that stable.
It makes sense that QNX is overhyped and not near as good as some claim. Being proprietary and small, they simply do not have the resources to polish it and keep it polished. Linux has many huge companies paying for hundreds of talented developers to work on every part.
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I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs.
Well that settles it then! QNX is total crap.
That's why over 50% of the cars rolling off the assembly line today come with it installed.
I prefer the philosophy of right tool for the job. And QNX for now is the best choice for auto makers. I use Linux where it makes sense and when AGL [linuxfoundation.org] matures it might become the best tool for the job. But don't expect auto makers to jump on it if they can't control it.
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> Well that settles it then! QNX is total crap.
> That's why over 50% of the cars rolling off the assembly line today come with it installed.
Enh.... I'm on your side, really, but I have to point out that this is not a strong argument. Over 50% of cars rolling off the assembly line also have airbags that explode and imbed shrapnel in your face. So, usage is not necessarily a good test of quality.
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I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs. It may be secure, but it's actually not that stable. It makes sense that QNX is overhyped and not near as good as some claim. Being proprietary and small, they simply do not have the resources to polish it and keep it polished
I've worked on QNX. It was the most polished embedded system I've worked with. Also, your post sounds a lot like a troll.
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That mirrors my experience also -- albeit we're talking about the versions that were around up to about 2003. It was one super-cool, very elegant and lightweight OS that just worked and worked (as most RTOSes are required to).
It's a shame that its lack of applications (outside the realm of process-control and bespoke code) so restricted its market.
And the company that wrote it was pretty cool too. I recall that they used to include a bag of choc-chip cookies in the boxed editions that I bought -- a nice t
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It's a shame that its lack of applications (outside the realm of process-control and bespoke code) so restricted its market.
Yeah. I had a little bit of hope when BB based their devices on it, but that didn't go anywhere.
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I've heard from people who work with * that it has plenty of bugs.
Generalized that for you.
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I have a 2013 Ram 1500 with the QNX based 8.4 head unit. It is awesome, and fast, very fast.
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:5, Interesting)
QNX may not be everywhere, but it was a mature product when Linux was just a kernel and people were grafting Minix functionality into the user space.
It does sound like an advertising pitch, but this is accurate about QNX. The OS isn't cheap, but it does offer realtime functionality. It also is designed to be quite stable to where a bug or a hang can cause tremendous disasters, be it software with X-ray machine or figuring out what position to move a set of control rods in a reactor. QNX has excellent internal security, and a decent development kit.
In embedded development, I'd probably use Linux for most items (because it has a wide variety of tools available), however if it is any way connected to something that can kill or seriously injure, like a component on a car's CANbus, I'd go QNX because it is going on 30 years and a very mature product. Realtime OS functionality isn't needed everywhere, but when it is needed, nothing else will do.
As for Ford's use, is it better than SYNC? This is more of an opinion question than anything else. I have had good luck with SYNC across a number of devices (Android and iOS), but others have had horror stories. Time will tell if end users prefer the QNX based audio head over previous ones.
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That doesn't make QNX wrong, you can put a GUI on top of it just fine; but it makes it a lot less obvious why MS got the boot. WinCE is kind of old and nasty; but the NT kernel is respectable
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Only reason I can guess is politics. QNX makes sense from a legal standpoint because if something does happen that is caused by the audio head, Ford could attest that they used a "known realtime hardened OS", with FIPS, Common Criteria, and other certifications.
With function creep, even though it is abhorrent, the audio head is becoming more and more a part of the CAN, where if it glitches and shits the bus, there goes the ECM and TCM. While something like Linux can work well, I'm guessing Ford wants some
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One of the reasons you would need a realtime os is Active Noise Control [qnx.com].
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We XP embedded in a (duh) embedded application. It's OK for the most part, but there are two problems. First, since the system is not patched after manufacture, viruses are a problem. Yes, it's partially bad design - but viruses won't be a problem with QNX. Security through obscurity means fewer support calls. The other problem is that it decides to take a little break every once in a while. It's probably just cleaning up memory or something, and it only lasts a few hundred milliseconds - but it is enough t
Re:Riiiiight. (Score:4, Informative)
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It does sound like an advertising pitch, but this is accurate about QNX. The OS isn't cheap, but it does offer realtime functionality. It also is designed to be quite stable to where a bug or a hang can cause tremendous disasters, be it software with X-ray machine or figuring out what position to move a set of control rods in a reactor. QNX has excellent internal security, and a decent development kit.
The thing is here it's being used for an in-car entertainment system. It doesn't have to be realtime, it doesn't have to require stability beyond what a regular kernel would offer. In fact it shouldn't matter a damn what kernel is powering the system since most of the functionality is going to be sitting in an application layer well above the kernel itself.
I'm not sure what motivated Ford to switch. Maybe QNX uses less memory or is more performant with the chipset they want to use, or is simply cheaper to
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Handjob? No. More likely they got a RIM job.
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Microsoft employee much?