The new Samsung Galaxy SIII won headlines last week for its many intelligent features plus a dazzling screen even larger than that of the hot selling SII.
You can see some of the phone’s cool features below.
For the car market, the device breaks ground as the first MirrorLink ready phone in the U.S. to the best of our knowledge. It now looks like MirrorLink will get an official stateside launch this summer, when the SIII is due for U.S. release and when the first two MirrorLink car radios will launch in the aftermarket—the XAV-701HD ($700) and XAV-601BT ($550)—from Sony. Both are both AV receivers with full control over Android, Nokia and Windows Phone smartphones. Apps appear as mirrored onto the car radio and users may control them from the radio. iPhone apps will also appear mirrored on the radio.
The Sony 601 is expected to ship at the end of this month while the 701 should ship in August.
Sony’s Taka Noguchi has said in the recent past, “MirrorLink is becoming the defacto standard in the industry—in the OE industry, the aftermarket, as well as the mobile phone industry. You can easily connect a smartphone and car audio.”
MirrorLink’s aim is to allow most phones to work with most car radios (OEM and aftermarket). It permits a mirror image of your phone to appear on the car radio screen, and let the radio control the phone.
You can see a 17 second video clip of MirrorLink on the Galaxy SIII below:
The Galaxy SIII should “help MirrorLink get established and get early volume sales,” said IHS iSuppli analyst Egil Juliussen. Samsung sells a staggering 20,000 Galaxy phones every hour. And one in four phone sold around the globe are by Samsung, now the leading phone maker.
But Juliussen notes that MirrorLink is only one of four smartphone-to-car radio standards vying for a place in the automobile. Two others are Harman’s Aha Radio and Pioneer’s Zypr. And the strongest competitor may yet be HTML5. The new Cadillac Cue due next month will support HTML5, said Juliussen. An Audi spokesman at CES in January told CEoutlook that HTML5 will be a strong platform for car radios.
As for the new Samsung Galaxy SIII, it provides Siri-like voice control, and it has facial recognition so if you take a photo of your friends, you can automatically send them all a copy. It “knows” when you are still using the phone so it won’t go into lock mode because it tracks your eye movement. It runs Android 4.0 and will be available later this year in 4G.
CNET says: “The Samsung Galaxy S3 brings a gorgeous 4.8-inch 720p display, quad-core processor and 8-megapixel camera, all crammed into a good-looking, impossibly slim and light casing. At this point we have few concerns, and this smart phone looks set to reproduce the Galaxy S2’s success.”
Alpine is also expected to offer a MirrorLink car radio in the U.S. this year.
Source: CEoutlook
