Gentlemen, start your cloud. That's the proposition of the Viper SmartStart, a smartphone car control app which allows drivers to start, lock, unlock and monitor their vehicles remotely from their smartphone. To date, the app has been downloaded by over one million iPhone, Android and Blackberry users. So obviously a lot of car owners are going keyless.
To get even more drivers to go that route, today Viper introduced SmartStart 3.0, a new multi-featured iteration that goes even further in making the cloud-connected car a reality.
Available Q1 of this year, SmartStart 3.0 features new enhancements, including SmartSchedule, a patent-pending feature the company is dubbing as "half weatherman, half mind-reader." The feature lets users input their daily driving routine and temperature thresholds and then a DCS (Directed Cloud Service) does the rest, monitoring temperatures, handset location and other variables before pushing Smart Alerts so users know when to start their car to heat or cool the interior. Let's just hope their data is better than that used by our local newscast weatherman.
Taking the app in to the realm of more sophisticated telemetics, another new feature to be rolled out soon is the ability to receive vehicle diagnostics, giving app users rich data on their vehicle's health. Another new feature that caught our eye is Auxiliary Channels, which adds functions such as the ability to control power windows from the app. And System Status is an upgrade that not only monitors whether a vehicle has received a signal from the device, but confirms in real-time that a function, such as locking a door or ignition start, has actually been completed.
-- Eric Hiss, Contributor
trollson says:
06:48 PM, 01/10/12
Yo dawg, it's time to bounce! We write like dat becuz da only degrees we got be Fahrenheit.
heartlessbstrd says:
08:53 AM, 01/11/12
Very clever