S60 Open to new features

very nice.. this past week when I was out shopping for xmas gifts I saw a few head units with more than just a 3.5 input in the front, it also had USB,and even an SD card drive!
the only thing is that ive experienced is that the pop port on my e61 isnt stable all the time.. it be nice to have an adapter that would let you plug the pop port and your charger to it so that it doesnt drain the battery.. have you tried streaming internet radio and playing it on your car?

Good post! I use a similar setup, but with a casette adaptor instead of the line in cord. The sound quality may not be as good, but that's OK in the car. I regularly listen to podcasts in the car this way (using my N75 or whatever else I'm carrying around). I've also tried Internet Radio a few times, using the S60 app and even Orb.

More like a shame Nokia didn't think ahead to include something as simple as BlueTooth 2.0

I admit tho it's a nice setup, I don't even have an AUX in on my deck

Wouldn't it be cool if S60 device could act as a FM transmitter to the car audio system?

No it wouldn't

quality is crap, yet another radio to stick onto already cramped motherboards, and increased power draw

have you tried streaming internet radio and playing it on your car?

Actually I haven't, but I'm sure I'd work. A couple months ago my boss showed me my data bill for the month, it was something like $1500. The internet radio stopped. :-) (no flat rate data plans offered here yet)

Wouldn't it be cool if S60 device could act as a FM transmitter to the car audio system?

I had one of those FM transmitters (Illegal here in Finland I believe) for my iPod. Like Stefan said, the quality is kinda crap, and tuning in those stations is a pain in the butt.

Is there a pop-port to USB cable out there?

Phil, isn't the regular data cable just that?

Stefan, I'm not an expert in this field.. You said BT 2.0, so you mean there are car decks with BT already? S60 device would then use A2DP to stream music into the car setup? That would be cool. I'm not sure but there might quality issues also, is A2DP really Hifi enough?

I guess WLAN would be a more flexible solution though. I've had this dream about having car as a WLAN cloud. There I could play music from any S60 device (through UPnP for example) or just use the phone as a remote control. Car would have of course have it's own 3G/Wimax/whatnot modem that could be used from any connecting device (S60, PC, PSP, ..). Did I get too carried away :)

Phil, isn't the regular data cable just that?

I should say - Alot of the new car headunits accept USB in the front, would plugging the standard popport-USB cable allow music from Music Player to be passed through?

I never came accross one of these USB-enabled cars but i suppose that the USB port is there to plug a USB key that contains MP3 files and that the car radio has a built-in MP3 player. In this case, plugging the phone via USB in data transfer mode should work provided that the music is on the memory card and that it's in a format that the car radio can play.

I have a similar setup but need some advice. I have bluetooth (1) in my car and it works great as a headset to the phone. Problem is that the car thinks its routing a phone, and not a music player, so playing via bluetooth is a no-go. So I tried the line-in option. Works well as a music player (the output is a bit low) but is really crap as a phone headset: When the phone rings I have to quickly rip out the pop port connector and grab the phone to speak (against the law here in SA) as the phone now seems to think its now connected to a headset and my voice is not routed via the phones mike anymore. Surely this is a pretty stupid design fault in the pop port to 3.5mm jack converter? As a matter of fact, the converter is a pretty stupid thing and set me back far too much. Any ideas?

Direct cable into the car audio unit is the best. The tape adaptor is good assuming you still have a cassette player. I personally am not a big fan of the FM transmitters but sometimes that is the only option.