Spotify stops making Car Thing 5 months after general launch

arstechnica.com

10 points·samizdis··10 comments

This was just such a weird thing to build in the first place...

My first thought was "looks nice, 49$ ... maybe its hackable"

Would be a nice little monitor, maybe for a raspberry pi

All these consumer products use the cheapest parallel LCDs you can find, you'll spend more than $49 trying to make it interface with anything else.

I always thought the Car Thing looked cool, but never really understood who or what it was for.

If it requires a phone with Spotify to be connected, why wouldn’t I just connect my phone directly to my car stereo (or whatever the preferred input device is, aux cord, etc)?

Yeah it doesn’t really make any sense- if you’re gonna charge me almost $100 for a Spotify player I’m gonna need more.

Preferably it should have its own cell modem and built in service plan, and since I already paid $90 for the thing it should really work for free. At least for a few years.

Has anyone managed to get arbitrary code execution on it? Then it might be of use, instead of ewaste

FWIW, the article does say: The Spotify rep also told the publication that Spotify will support the Car Things already purchased, which "will perform as intended."

But arbitary code execution sounds like it would be a more robust outcome.

“Perform as intended” -> ewaste :(

Was this the reason they got rid of "car mode" for their app?

Can I use Apple or Google Maps with this at the same time?

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