Shortly after posting my piece about BlueToothing my Droid Razr to my Panasonic car stereo, I got this fascinating response from San Diego based indie consultant Bob Hudson:
“I put Internet radio in my car back in 2005,” Hudson wrote, “connecting a Palm Treo through the car’s audio system using one those audio adapters that fits into a car’s cassette player (remember tape????).”
In those days, Hudson continued:
” . . . the data connections on what were not yet called ‘smartphones’ was quite slow, but many radio stations offered low-bandwidth connections and thus I was able to cruise around Southern California listening to my favorite blues station (from Kansas City). It was actually easier to do that back then because there were so few models of phones that it was possible to buy a cradle custom-made for your phone. It had audio and power connections so all you had to do was slide the phone into the cradle and it was connected to the car.”
source: bobhudson.com
Reading Bob’s account, 2005 feels like such a long time ago. The iPhone was still two years away. The first 4G handset was five years off. Wireless subscribership hadn’t reached 70 percent of the population (it would pass 90 percent in 2009). And the Palm Treo is long gone, replaced by the Palm Pre series.
But Hudson saw it all coming: “Long before internet radio was available on the go I did a parody piece [see image on right] and actually got several emails from people at tech companies wanting to know more about this miracle streaming device.”
