Apple introduces CarPlay: the best iPhone experience on four wheels

Apple has just announced CarPlay at the Geneva International Motor Show (Switzerland), a novel dashboard experience coming soon to select new cars in 2014. According to several reports, these will include top-tier Mercedes, Ferrari, Honda, Jaguar and Volvo cars. Afterwards a huge lineup of makers will add to their cars (including, but not limited to, Ford, Kia, BMW and Opel.)

CarPlay seems to not only play a pun on AirPlay, the service that allows iOS content to flow from your devices to your AppleTV, but piggyback on it while adding two-way touch capabilities: touch your car dashboard, interact with your iPhone. Not only touch, but even the standard knobs, dials and buttons will manage your CarPlay experience. This seems to hint on a future revamping of the AirPlay experience, too: if you can interact with CarPlay enabled apps directly from your screen or controller, nothing prevents a controller to interact with AirPlay enabled apps… Opening the gates for the much rumoured entry of Apple into living room gaming consoles.

CarPlay will be compatible with any iPhone 5 model (5, 5s and 5c.) Probably compatibility will be added to the iPad Air before the complete launch.

You can read Apple’s press release here.