(I also wish Spotify brought along some version of its excellent Spotify Stations app for quickly selecting from a list of online radio stations)Ĭar Thing is also limited in what it can do beyond playing music and podcasts. While you can use “Hey Spotify” voice commands to load specific albums, browsing your album collection requires scrolling to the furthest end of the main menu, and wading through large thumbnail views for each album feels inefficient. My main nitpick is that the interface is very much playlist-centric, much like Spotify itself. This is a lot to take in at first-especially if you’re used to exclusively swiping around on modern smartphones, but eventually you get the hang of it, and being able to switch between stations without looking at the screen is both easier and safer than using a phone. You can’t even use the device without a $10 per month Spotify Premium subscription, and its ability to control other audio sources is extremely limited.
If your car supports Bluetooth audio, your phone can stay in your pocket while Car Thing provides the controls.īut while I appreciate what Spotify is trying to accomplish with Car Thing-which publicly launched in February and received a major feature update last week-it also represents one of the biggest pitfalls of modern gadgets: Its purpose is not merely to make streaming audio more seamless in any car, but to lock users into Spotify’s ecosystem through hardware. Mount it to a vent or your car’s CD tray, and it presents a small touchscreen interface for navigating the Spotify catalog. Even using your phone with a car dashboard mount can be a pain, and smartphone menus are too complicated to navigate safely while driving anyway.Ĭar Thing eliminates those annoyances with a simple, $90 aftermarket device for playing music and podcasts from your phone.
And while Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto do a fine job bringing smartphone apps to car dashboards, in most cases they still require plugging in your phone on every trip. In-car infotainment systems are often cumbersome to navigate and don’t play well with streaming music services, and lots of older cars still don’t have touchscreen systems at all.
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