You know Pandora is great especially in the car, except those times when you wear out the thumbs down button because you get like 7 or 8 crappy songs in a row, it happens.
Your iPod is great.
All the music on there is stuff you like, except for the ones you don't like anymore.
So where is the middle ground between predictive and on demand when you're on the road.
That's what Mog says they are.
It's a streaming service that mounts up on your iPhone for now and BMW's and Mini's.
You put this in this cradle right here and then it let's you do either predictive streaming like Pandora or you can do (onesie twosie?) stuff.
Pick the exact song you want like Spotify.
All of these of course wirelessly.
It also lets you do interesting blend sort of Spotifies artist specificity with Pandora's predictive playlist and let's take a look how it actually works in this car.
You get this kind of cover flow looking thing which is very attractive.
Those not literally cover flow.
Now the tool you're gonna wear out the most is gonna be search.
This is where it's really cool.
You can go artist, album or song.
They've got 13 million tracks in their library.
One of the largest out there.
If I search an artist for example, here come all the albums that they've got from artist and then I can dig any one of those and find songs and add those to a queue to keep them playing or it will just play through the album naturally in track order, so its all kind of very logical and intuitive.
Here's what interesting, I can also say make that artist the core of radio mode, like you do with Pandora.
Say play this artist to play this song and make a playlist out of it.
They do that, but they also let me do this, I can say only tracks by that artist as supposed to going off and playing stuff that they think sounds like that artist, which I don't think sounds like that artist or I can go to similar which is more Pandora like.
Now notice everything I'm doing here is BMW Idrive Style, not a special interface from Mog.
The means I use the Idrive knob to navigate and select this inscrutable little icons on the left, but once you get used to them, they actually make sense, but let's look at the cost.
First of all, in this BMW, you've got to have BMW apps, that's a $250 option.
On top of that, you have to have an LCD based car, which is another cost of several thousand, depending which model you buy.
Then there's the $10 a month to get Mog at the premium level which allows all of this mobile technology to use it through your phone and through your car.
Now, how hard will Mog hit your wireless data plan?
Their mobile version streams at 64 kilobits, sounds fine, not amazing.
That comes out to about 28 megabytes per hour.
Let's take the average US commute of around 25 minutes each way or about 17 hours a month.
If you listen to Mog 80% of that time on commute alone, that's about 380 megabytes of data.
Well under the typical 3g data plan of 2 or 3 gigabytes, but it would also probably double the average amount of data you're using today.
Okay, so its a little pricey in this particular use case, it is well done , but here's what would be better done, if Apple opens up the Siri Voice Command API to developers like Mog, so I could Siri drive the Mog app on my phone, then I don't have to worry about what automakers support what.
That to me is the secret sauce, I hope they agree.
