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Smart Drive iPhone app and car cradle

At Geneva 2010, Smart unveiled the Smart Drive iPhone app and an iPhone car cradle for its diminutive ForTwo city car.

Derek Fung
Derek loves nothing more than punching a remote location into a GPS, queuing up some music and heading out on a long drive, so it's a good thing he's in charge of CNET Australia's Car Tech channel.
Wayne Cunningham Managing Editor / Roadshow
Wayne Cunningham reviews cars and writes about automotive technology for CNET's Roadshow. Prior to the automotive beat, he covered spyware, Web building technologies, and computer hardware. He began covering technology and the Web in 1994 as an editor of The Net magazine.
Derek Fung
Wayne Cunningham
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1 of 7 Wayne Cunningham/CNET

Call that a phone?

At the 2010 Geneva Motor Show, Smart unveiled the Smart Drive iPhone app and an iPhone car cradle for its diminutive ForTwo city car.

Smart built this giant-size iPhone to show off the app. It's fully functional and allows show goers to use pinch gestures to zoom in and out. It demonstrates the navigation function, music, including the web radio application, the phone system and Smart assistance.

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2 of 7 Wayne Cunningham/CNET

Get Smart

Smart's iPhone app is designed for use inside its ForTwo hatch. Smart Drive's main menu includes buttons for navigation, phone, music and assistance. The phone function duplicates the iPhone's own phone application, but the buttons are bigger and designed to be used while driving; phone calls and audio play through the Smart's stereo.

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3 of 7 Wayne Cunningham/CNET

Tune it in and get lost

You'll not only be able to listen to music stored on an iPhone via the car's speakers, the app also has access to streaming web radio.

When you unplug the iPhone from the Smart car cradle, the app will remember your location. It will then helpfully guide you back there should you be unsure about whether you parked in the Itchy lot or the Scratchy lot.

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Navigation and pricing

The factory-installed Smart iPhone cradle costs €249 (AU$370). The basic app will cost €10 (AU$15), with turn-by-turn navigation priced at €50 (AU$75) annually.

The basic app includes on-board points-of-interest data and online maps supplied by Bing. Maps for the turn-by-turn navigation upgrade (Europe and US only, at this stage) are stored on the iPhone. The turn-by-turn nav upgrade features text-to-speech for spoken street names, as well as traffic warnings.

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Candid camera

Smart is developing a Wi-Fi camera that can communicate with the iPhone, enabling the app to keep tabs on the speed limit and warn you when you're going over.

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6 of 7 Wayne Cunningham/CNET

Grey style

In addition to the app and cradle, Smart showed off a new trim level at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show called Grey Style.

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7 of 7 Wayne Cunningham/CNET

Matte grey

The Grey Style trim can be applied to both the turbo and hybrid versions of the Smart ForTwo in Europe. It includes a matte grey paint job with yellow accents, fog lights and six-spoke alloy wheels.

No word yet on whether the app, cradle or Grey Style trim will be making their way to Australia.

Via CNET US

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