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Transportation Blackberry Microsoft Operating Systems

Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX 233

Posted by Soulskill from the no-bsods-on-wheels dept.
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.
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Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX More

Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX

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  • Good news (Score:3)

    by jbernardo ( 1014507 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:21AM (#48581409)

    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...

  • Great. More touchscreens. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rogoshen1 ( 2922505 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:23AM (#48581443)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Completely agree. We're throwing tech into these cars for the sake of tech.. not functionality.

    • Re:Great. More touchscreens. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrLogic17 ( 233498 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:35AM (#48581579) Journal

      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)

        by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:47AM (#48581725) Journal

        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?

        • Or, better yet, Auto Industry, come up with a "standard" that we can "upgrade" our systems quickly and easily.

          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.

          • "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

            • I would love to see actual evidence of this

              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???

              "So when we look at what we can do with a 4G pipe into a car," Akerson said, "you can change the business model almost entirely."

              GM foresees expanded offerings such as custom apps, streaming entertainment and enhanc

              • 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

                • Yup, and yet they still failed. Good Job guys! How about going back to building cars and not trying to monetize the after purchase experience to death.

                  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

                  • 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.

        • If anything, we've gotten worse on standardization over time.

          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

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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

          • 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.

        • well, there is one component that is pretty standard and easilly upgradable, the stereo. I just purchased a used car (2008 miata). The stereo came with a 30 pin ipod connector tucked in the glovebox. Ive outfitted it with the required lighting adapter to work with my phone, but i wouldn't mind having a modern stereo that can do bluetooth. The upgrade might be painless, but there's one big issue: THIEVES. The big selling point of the kind of crummy factory stereo is it's good enough and nobody is going to wa

        • 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

    • 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?

      • 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.

        • 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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MSG ( 12810 )

          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.

        • 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

        • 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.

        • 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]

      • 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.

      • Have you seen the other brands versions of the same thing? Functionally the same

        • 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".

    • Soon enough, you won't have to watch the road and suddenly having your smartphone integrated with your vehicle will be a good thing.
    • I have a 2010 Ford with the non-touch screen Sync, because I didn't want the touch screen. Most of the time Sync works fine - once in a while it becomes unresponsive for a few minutes.

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bws111 ( 1216812 )

          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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wiredog ( 43288 )

      Nothing but ads? I never hear ads on Sirius.

  • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:35AM (#48581575)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plover ( 150551 )

      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

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      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.

      Sounds very similar to the gripes I have about the Microsoft GUI on my Uverse "cable" box / DVR.

    • 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)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:35AM (#48581581)

    "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?"

  • It is about freaking time.

  • um (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:41AM (#48581645)

    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!!!

  • I sold my Ford stock a few years ago when I saw they were teaming up with M$ for their in-dash info and music system. What were they thinking?

  • $1,000,000 idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MrLogic17 ( 233498 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:43AM (#48581681) Journal

    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....

  • 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)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @11:58AM (#48581827) Homepage

      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.

      • The way I say it, QA is going to find a certain amount of bugs (otherwise they feel their job is worthless). If they can't find functionality bugs, they'll file UX bugs, that error messages don't make sense, that something isn't intuitive. That's a good thing. It's a sign that you (if you're a programmer) have done a good job.
    • It appears that the UI was also overhauled in addition to switching to QNX so Ford is fixing their problems.

  • 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)

    by DriveDog ( 822962 ) on Friday December 12, 2014 @01:28PM (#48583189)
    Funny, I wouldn't have given Ford the credit for recognizing the wisdom of such a move. Kudos to them. Wish my IPTV provider would ditch the Cisco/Windows set tops for something based on QNX, as they're seriously horrible. Part of what's smart about this move by Ford is that it avoids their cars being associated with the frequent complaint of how bad MS stuff can be, whether correct or not. There's no such conversation among other than geeks about QNX. It has numerous supporters and very few detractors for any reason other than it's not free. The only downside I see (aside from there being used cars out there with Windows) is that others—GM, Fiat/Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan—are likely to hesitate to move to QNX. There's still quite a bit of NIH syndrome.
  • Yes, I'm a Ford Sync user (a 2012, a 2013, and a 2014 model).

    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

    • 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.

  • 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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