Pioneer AppRadio, bringing the iPhone to the car radio

Pioneer wants to take car radios one step further. With their new AppRadio they want to move the iPhone to the radio screen, so they can access the various menus on the phone, use the GPS navigator or listen directly to the music on it.

Car radios have not advanced much in terms of their conception since the beginning. Their evolution has been so small that any modern car radio can be used in cars of 20 or 30 years ago. The connections are maintained and the mounting module as well.

The only areas where the radios have improved are in audio quality, the ability to connect via Bluetooth with the mobile, read memory cards or content on a USB drive.

It seems that Pioneer is tired of making the same thing and wants to go one step further . That’s why they present us with AppRadio, a car radio only compatible with double height bays with a big screen.

The SPH-DA01 connects to our iPhone via USB through an application that we can download from the App Store and that will take care of bringing the information from the iPhone to the screen of the Pioneer radio.

Thanks to this, we can access the menus on our phone and do things like listen to the music on the iPod or use the GPS navigator. We don’t know very well how the application works, because Apple doesn’t allow to do video-mirroring with the iPhone, so the App will probably access the iPhone data to show it through its own interface.

Hopefully Pioneer has worked out the interface well, and made it a little more decent compared to the aberrations you can see in most touchscreen car radios. It would have been desirable for the iPhone to be able to connect wirelessly with the SPH-DA0 , but the battery consumption might be too high.

The AppRadio will go on sale at the end of June, and the price will be around 400 Euros .