Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Figure 14-2:
The Omnifi
system in
your car!
Chapter 14: Other Cool Things You Can Network
Our favorite product for this was the Rockford Fosgate 802.11b-based car
product, Omnifi (www.omnifimedia.com), which was, sadly, sold only until
late 2005. Omnifi allows you to wirelessly transfer tunes from your home
PC to the car, where they can be played on your existing car stereo. The
Omnifi has an installable hard drive that can store as many as 20GB of files;
the home component is a stand-alone receiver capable of streaming media
dispatched from the PC (see Figure 14-2). We were sorry to see this product
taken off the market because it’s really the only (shipping) retrofit, autoupdating,
automobile-based Wi-Fi wireless system we’ve seen. You can still
find it on eBay and in various online stores.
Omnifi eliminates the legwork (the need to burn CDs or load your iPod) to
listen to digital music in the car. It gives consumers the ability to download
and transfer music and programs from the Internet to the PC hard drive to
the consumer’s car and home stereo and theater systems — using wireless
technologies. You can also subscribe to services such as audiobooks, from
www.audible.com, so that you can listen to your favorite mystery book
while you drive down the road. iTunes work as well. Very cool.
Other vendors say that they’re entering the marketplace, so expect your car
to become a hot zone for wireless technologies soon. Delphi Corporation, a
well-known brand in car electronics, has been working with several partners
to bring home-car integration to the market. It has shown prototype Wi-Fi
enabled devices that sync with cable set-top boxes in your living room, and
is working to bring audio and video downloads to the car.
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