Kevin Bostic
BMW on Wednesday announced four new BMW Approved apps for Apple's iPhone, bringing owners of both items a range of new music and connectivity options.
The newest BMW Approved Apps are Audible, Glympse, Rhapsody, and TuneIn. Audible, from Amazon, allows users to play downloadable audio books and other spoken-word content through their iOS devices. Users of the app have access to Audible's massive audiobook library.
Glympse is a location-sharing app that leverages the iPhone's GPS capabilities to let others know where a user is when en route to a place. The app can share locations to other Glympse users, using the phone's existing contact list, or to a user's social media feed.
Rhapsody is a premium, ad-free, on-demand music service. The service counts more than one million subscribers, all of whom can listen to more than 16 million tracks on their connected devices. With BMW integration, the app will allow users to control music with the vehicle's built-in controls. The app's music discovery tools have also been reworked in order to take advantage of in-car use capabilities.
TuneIn is an Internet radio app allowing users to listen to music, sports, talk, and news from more than 70,000 AM, FM, HD, and Internet radio stations around the globe. As with Rhapsody, the TuneIn app has been specialized to take advantage of the infotainment controls built into BMWs.
BMWs from model year 2011 forward can have the BMW apps option built in, allowing them to connect to a user's iPhone by USB cable or using a snap-in adapter. Once connected, the iPhone can be controlled using the vehicle's iDrive controller, steering wheel buttons, and on-board monitor.
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9 Comments
Looks nice! Not that I have an icebergs chance in hell of affording a new Beamer in any case.. Looking at Glympse, I used to be a big fan when it came out a couple of years back. However I hadn't touched it for ages until Navigon came out with Glympse integration. Great idea, but terrible implementation. I couldn't get the blessed thing to send a Glympse, for love nor money. Admittedly, this was while stuck in heavy traffic, but the interface has become extremely unintuitive in my opinion.
None of these apps sound remotely interesting to me. I use the Pandora integration with BMW Apps occasionally. I wish BMW would work with more developers to get them to add integration. The rate at which they're adding new apps is so slow.
Yawn.
When Siri is fully integrated with key connectivity functions -- phone calls, texts, emails, location-based queries, internet searches, and most importantly navigation -- let us know, BMW.
It would also be nice to be able to control all my music from my iPad/iPhone/iPod via Siri-based voice commands; photo streaming may not be a bad option either (although that would be for the passengers, not the driver while driving).....
"both items"... can you REALLY call a BMW an "item"? I'm not a native English speaker, but it somehow bugs me to put a 2mx1m (or something) machine on the same foot as a device that's measured in centimeters...
What's the point. Just give me screen mirroring on the LCD and call it a day. The apps already work on the phone, why reinvent them on the BMW screen??