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It's not quite the Singularity, but for the first time ever our species is outnumbered by active mobile devices, many of which we officially consider to be "smart," including a growing percentage that only communicate from one machine to another.
According to the US Census Bureau's world population counter, we are currently just a few million shy of 7.2 billion people on the planet. That figure is growing by about 2 people per second, or 1.2 percent annually. But head over to the counter of active mobile connections maintained by mobile analysis firm GSMA Intelligence and you'll see that there's currently over 7.2 billion SIM cards operating in the world right now, and that figure is growing over five times faster than the population counter.
"No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone. It's the fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever -- from zero to 7.2 billion in three decades," said Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co. in a release highlighting the milestone. Kimberlin's firm was an initial investor in Millicom, a startup that works to bring mobile connections to developing countries with the help of partnerships with bigger names like Facebook.
While there may be more active SIMs than people, a little less than half the population has a mobile subscription, or put another way, there are almost two active SIMs for each unique subscriber worldwide.
So we officially live in a world where there are enough connected phones, tablets or similar devices for everyone. Yet, it's not exactly Skynet.
Or is it? Did I mention that what actually puts the number of active mobile connections over the top in its race with the meatbag population is the estimated quarter billion active machine-to-machine connections? These M2M connections are for things like cars, medical appliances, smart utility meters and freight packages.
No one yet measures the number of active mobile M2KR (machine-to-killer-robot) connections. Perhaps it's time we started.
Road trip essentials for adults best summer road trip road trip essentials for teens road trip essentials for adults essentials for long road trips summer road trip ideas fun road trip essentials 10 roads trucking 10 roads trucking greensboro nc 10 roads logistics llc
10 Road Trip Essentials for Summer Travel
10 Road Trip Essentials for Summer Travel
Road trips are awesome: Endless highways let you go anywhere and just about everywhere. From the oceans to the mountains, and every variation of flat farmland, rocky valley and scenic vista along the way, it can be all kinds of grand adventure.
Whether you're planning on a few days, a few weeks or multiple months, the right road trip gear can make or break a trip. What follows isn't a list of gadgets, though there are a few. Instead, it's a mix of easy-to-find items, some essential apps and services and a handful of tips that will make your trip go a lot smoother. It's also mostly focused on the "road" part of "road trip," though some of these summer road trip essentials will work just fine if you're jetsetting. I hope you've got your camping and hiking gear sorted already, if that's your thing.
And who am I to offer advice? A lover of road trips. Last year I did a 10-week, 10,000-mile road trip around the US. This year, a 9,900-mile adventure that hit nine national parks. Before that, I took multiple trips across and around the US, Europe, Australia and more. Yeah. I love road trips.
Understandably, there will be variations on what you need depending how long you're going, where you're going, your mode of travel and how many people are with you. I don't expect everyone to drive for 10 weeks in a Miata, though if you have the chance, I'd highly recommend it.
Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
Download maps for use offline
I think it's fair to say most of us take for granted that we'll have mobile data wherever we go. Depending where your road trip takes you, you might not. If you stick to the interstates, you're probably fine. But if you want to take some incredible two-lane backroads, perhaps not.
It's easy to download Google Maps so you can still figure out where you're going, even if you don't have data. Simply search for where you're going such as "Wrangell-St, Elias National Park." Swipe up twice so the location info fills the screen. Tap the triple vertical dots in the upper right and select download offline map. Then select the area you'll be covering on your drive.
GPS location info doesn't require a data connection, only a reasonably clear view of the sky. As long as the maps are already loaded, you can navigate on roads and even from many trails.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Consider an unlimited data upgrade
If you're usually within Wi-Fi range, you probably don't realize how quickly certain activities can eat up your data. Music, for instance, is only a fraction of the data required for video, but listening nonstop for six hours each day during a drive can quickly nuke your plan's included data.
If your provider has an unlimited option, it's worth considering. Some, like Google Fi, let you swap to an unlimited plan any month you want. I also like Google Fi because it has no international roaming in case your road trip is really epic. Check your current provider if you don't already have unlimited data.
Alternately, consider downloading music/podcasts/audiobooks when you're on Wi-Fi and then turn off your data connection in the car (though make sure you download the maps first!).
We've rounded up the best unlimited data plan options for the three major US carriers.
Check out Best Unlimited Data Plans for 2022 for more..
Scosche/CNET
Cars have come with USB plugs for years now, but you've probably noticed they don't recharge your phone very quickly. Some do, in which case you can probably ignore this gadget. If yours doesn't, or if you have more devices than charge ports, consider a separate USB plug for your "cigarette lighter" outlet. The better ones, like the Anker PowerDrive Speed Plus and Scosche CPDCA38 can output enough power to rapidly charge your devices. I've had an older, slower version of the latter and it's worked great for years.
If your car has Android or Apple Auto, these typically require a physical connection between the car and the phone, which precludes the use of a cigarette adapter.
Amazon
This isn't strictly a "road" essential, but I recommend one for any kind of travel. A reasonably-sized USB battery, say 10,000 mAh or so, that can fast charge your phone or other devices can be handy in many situations and a lifesaver in others.
There are infinite sizes, shapes and colors. I don't recommend the smallest ones because they're more for emergencies and usually only give you a partial charge. I also don't recommend really massive ones as they're just heavy to lug around. A 10,000-mAh battery can charge your phone from empty multiple times. There's no "perfect" size, but it's worth starting there to figure out what you need.
I've traveled with various batteries for years. My current pick is the Anker PowerCore 10000 PD Redux because it's small, but has high capacity and charges my phone rapidly via USB-C.
Windex/CNET
These were the MVP of my road trip last year: They're wet wipes, but for windows. Why are they on a list of essentials? Because there's only so much windshield wipers can do: Some bugs and grime are just too much for them to handle. These work great on even the most gruesome bug guts.
The package is resealable too, so you can keep them tucked beside your seat for when they're needed.
Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
The majority of Americans live within a road trip's distance of at least one national park, often several. No matter where your road trip is headed, check if it passes near one. They're all good and worth a visit.
Some are free, but most have an entry fee around $30 or so. Or you can get the annual National Park pass, also called the America the Beautiful or Interagency pass. This gets you in over 2,000 federal lands. Three visits to any park should let it pay for itself.
You can get them at the park's entrance or on the USGS and REI websites.
If you are considering visiting a national park this year, check out top tips for visiting them.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst? If you have room for it, some kind of roadside emergency kit is probably a good idea. I say "probably" since the better option for most people is a AAA membership, so your phone and a USB battery pack will keep you covered. I mean, does your car even have a spare tire? Mine doesn't. It comes with wishful thinking and a phone number.
But it's possible your adventure will take you away from cell coverage, and that's a bad place to get a flat or have a breakdown. The Lifeline kit linked here is decent, for what it is. To be honest, though, I'm not sure how useful these really are. None of the items in this kit are a bad idea, per se, but will you use them even if you do break down? You can get a first aid kit separately (and you should). Same for a tire inflator. But is there anyone out there that knows enough about car repair to need a crappy screwdriver and wrench set? If so, wouldn't they already have quality tools? Do you know how to safely connect jumper cables so you don't accidentally blow up a car battery? If you said "positive to positive, negative to negative," don't buy jumper cables. Call for help.
So yeah, I feel like a USB battery pack and a AAA membership are far more useful for most people for most road trips. But hey, if you know you're going to be driving into the unknown, it's worth considering… but if you're that advanced I'd assume you already have the right gear.
If you want some other options, check out our best emergency kits for cars.
AAA
There's one annual bill that's permanently on my "always renew" list: my AAA membership. I've only had to use it a handful of times, but it's a peace of mind that's easily worth its cost. And it's not even that expensive. Get towed once and you've paid for your membership for several years.
And it's not just towing. They'll help you change a flat, give your car a jump and more. This is a no-brainer.
There are a ton of choices for cameras, and for most people I'd actually say your phone is fine. An expensive camera isn't going to take better pictures if you don't know how to use it. Also, you can take great photos with your phone.
If you have an older phone or want something more for rugged travel, a GoPro can take great photos and videos and doesn't cost a ton. The Hero 9 and 10 are very similar, though the 10 is a little easier to use as it has a faster processor. I used the 9 on my trip last year, and the 10 on my trip this year, and the 10 annoyed me way less and didn't lock up as much.
I actually did a whole article about this topic: Best Camera Gear for Your Next Road Trip.
Geoff Morrison/CNET
This is a bit tricky as your car and needs are probably different from mine. If you do get a GoPro, having somewhere to mount it in the car can get you some epic shots. There are a bunch of options. A suction cup mount is a good place to start. I like this one as it's inexpensive, but can pivot and swivel in just about any direction.
I also have an antenna mount I like a lot. You can see it with a long selfie stick attached with a 360 camera on top in the image above. It's from CravenSpeed and for the Miata, but they might have a version that fits your car.
As well as covering TV and other display tech, Geoff does photo tours of cool museums and locations around the world, including nuclear submarines, massive aircraft carriers, medieval castles, epic 10,000 mile road trips, and more. Check out Tech Treks for all his tours and adventures.
He wrote a bestselling sci-fi novel about city-size submarines, along with a sequel. You can follow his adventures on Instagram and his YouTube channel.
A year has 525,600 minutes. Matt Suda spent 206,989 of them -- more than a third of last year -- listening to Spotify.
Suda was one of the earliest customers to get his hands on an invite-only release of Car Thing, Spotify's first-ever hardware device, which goes on sale Tuesday. Unlike him, you probably didn't spend more time streaming music than sleeping last year. But Spotify is betting that Suda and about 140 million of you have something in common: Your car doesn't have a fancy infotainment system to rival a Tesla's.
"I was just interested in seeing Spotify's take on actually building their own hardware," said Suda, a 26-year-old student in Houston, who drives a 2012 Honda. "I wasn't expecting a whole lot. But getting the device and using it -- you can understand more the problem they're going after."
Spotify's main listening location is the home, but the car is a close second, said Gustav Söderström, Spotify's chief research and development officer. He says Americans spent an "insane" 70 billion hours a year on the road pre-pandemic. But while roughly 50% to 70% of cars on US roads may be able to connect to a phone, they're not so fresh-off-the-line as to have an entertainment display that easily streams tunes and podcasts.
To Spotify, that meant drivers in roughly 140 million cars might stream Spotify more -- or start paying for it if they don't already -- if a device could replicate Apple's Car Play or Android Auto for them.
"Why would we do something ourselves here?" Söderström said. "If this already existed, we wouldn't have."
Enter Car Thing.
Sarah Tew/CNET
It may look like a bit like a sideways Zune, Microsoft's failed music player that launched in 2006. But with a credit-card-size touchscreen, mics to pick up voice commands, five buttons and a dial, the $90 Car Thing is a souped-up Spotify remote control for your ride. It mounts to your dash, with the goal of bringing a better way to safely stream music to drivers missing one of those fancy infotainment systems -- no dashboard teardown or new car required.
When Spotify first unveiled Car Thing in April, more than 2 million people signed up for its waitlist. The earliest people invited to try it got it free; by fall, people had to start paying $80. On Tuesday, it's finally going on sale in the US, with a $10 price hike to $90.
Currently, Car Thing works only with Spotify's premium tier. That means on top of the $90 you pay for the hardware, you also must pay for a Spotify membership. Its standard subscription is $10 a month, though it comes as cheap as $5 a month for students.
So Car Thing is only for Spotify -- but only for now.
Its software is on track for an update in "a few weeks" that will unlock it to control other audio apps, Söderström said. If you love Audible, Car Thing will be able to play, pause, skip and adjust volume for your audio books. The update will even allow Car Thing to work for services that are Spotify's direct competitors. "We want to be an open platform," he said.
That openness could, eventually, extend to "deeper integrations with potential partners" if Car Thing takes off, he added. While Spotify wouldn't elaborate on future partnerships, a Car Thing that could toggle between Spotify and Google Maps or Waze would give it the one-two punch of both music navigation and, well, literal navigation.
Broadening Car Thing may be wise, because those 140 million cars may be a more niche market than it seems, according to Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant at researcher MIDiA. Just 22% of US consumers stream music in the car.
"Streaming services are battling for market share over this relatively small demographic," Cirisano said.
With sales opening in the US on Tuesday, Spotify is about to start learning: Is Car Thing tapping into a caravan of unmet need for millions of drivers? Or is it driving headlong toward a dead end?
But as vehicles steer toward a future of being more autonomous, anything Spotify can do to solidify itself as the must-have music service in the car may pay dividends down the road.
"Full autonomy is probably the most elusive goal of all, but the dream is: You get into your car and all the windows turn into displays," said Edward Sanchez, a senior automotive analyst at Strategy Analytics. "That's what everyone's salivating at the prospect of."
Sarah Tew/CNET
Getting to mile one
The concept for something like Car Thing had been percolating at Spotify for a while, but the device's date of conception might be marked in 2018, when it got its name. First proposed over dinner among a handful of Spotify hardware designers and brand agents, Car Thing was a semi-serious placeholder that the design team adopted for a code name. The name was funny, very literal and a bit childish, said Andreas Cedborg, Spotify's head of hardware product.
"People think, 'Hey, you can't name it like that,'" Cedborg said. "But, yeah, you can."
Hints about Spotify making hardware for the car soon trickled out. In 2018, some marketing materials made their way to a smattering of Spotify users, advertising a voice-command device you could mount on your dash and pay for as an add-on to your Spotify subscription. Images showed a round device with a lit-up text display with a green circle border. Spotify declined to comment on images at the time, but the company now says it was just a test; it never produced the device pictured.
By May 2019, Spotify came clean it was experimenting with a device called Car Thing. It was different from the device in the leaked test images, but it was also a long way from what Car Thing would become.
Spotify's first iteration of Car Thing.
Spotify
The first Car Thing's screen was too small, its dial too big, Cedborg said. Its green accents, a nod to Spotify's flagship color, made it stick out from the rest of the dashboard rather than blending in. It also had its own battery, which the current version eschews in favor of a cable that connects to your car's USB port or 12-volt socket. While a battery would make Car Thing more self-sufficient, freezing temperatures inside a car during winter would ding battery life, and scorching heat with a car baking in the sun risked explosion. A battery also adds weight, making it trickier to mount well.
The Car Thing team's eureka moment was combining a hat-trick of voice commands, touch screen and physical inputs like buttons and dials. Drivers needed all three, working in concert, they realized. A touchscreen is impossible for typing each letter of a song title while driving, but voice commands handle long titles easily. Yet voice commands are a frustrating way to get to the bottom of a long playlist; a physical dial makes that simple. This three-prong approach was "the user interface that we didn't see anywhere in the car world," Söderström said.
After three more years of testing, redesign, user research and pandemic delays, Car Thing was ready for its unveiling. In April, Spotify published a blog post that yes, Car Thing was real. Yes, Car Thing was the name. And yes, it had arrived -- sort of. Spotify introduced the waitlist, and people who signed up for it could potentially get it free.
The current design of Car Thing.
Sarah Tew/CNET
"We just can't make enough of them," CEO Daniel Ek said in October about getting Car Things into the hands of waitlisted customers. Progress was crimped by global chip shortages, a problem that halted carmakers' assembly lines, made Apple's iPhone 12 launch weeks late and turned finding a Sony's PS5 game console into a Christmas miracle. (Ek wasn't available to discuss Car Thing's US launch.)
But this slow seeding of the device allowed Spotify to gather feedback about Car Thing in the wild, figuring out what needed change or improvement.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Road ahead
The version of Car Thing on sale Tuesday is the same physical device purchased off the waitlist. What's changed is the software. And the price.
In pricing Car Thing at $90, Spotify is straddling two worlds. On one side, Car Thing isn't meant to be a revenue engine. Hardware "is a means to an end," Söderström said. Spotify hopes you'll pay for its service more so than its hardware. But on the other side, Spotify doesn't want to sell Car Thing at a loss just to make back the money on memberships. It wants to get Car Thing in as many cars as possible, but it will gauge Car Thing's success by the new subscribers and higher listening rates from existing members it attracts.
Despite the price hike, Spotify wants to get the price down. The $10 price increase was the result of the rising cost of chips, the company said. One thing that could help bring down price is selling Car Thing, eventually, outside the US, since scaling production can bring down the unit cost of making them. Spotify isn't committing to international expansion, but there are clear markets where Car Thing could go next, Söderström said, pointing theoretically to parts of Central and South America and Europe.
The company could also pursue bundles and deals that could make Car Thing a stronger value, he said.
Gustav Söderström is Spotify's chief research and development officer.
Spotify
Söderström likens Car Thing to the Kindle, Amazon's hit e-reader. As Amazon's play to keep Apple from dominating digital books, Kindle was a means to an end, too. When the Kindle first launched in 2007, it was $399. Today, coincidentally, Kindles start at $90, the same price as Car Thing.
Car Thing also comes at a time when Spotify's public image has been buffeted by drama over its most popular podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience. The debate pits accusations of dangerous COVID-19 misinformation against advocacy of freedom of speech. Spotify declined to comment on the Rogan debate.
Though 2 million on the Car Thing waitlist is a big number, it may have included flocks of people looking to score a freebie and a gaggle who were enticed by the hype around Spotify's first hardware. Sara Kayden, the marketing lead for Car Thing, says Spotify's conversion rate -- the amount people who actually buy Car Thing when they get off the waitlist -- was "healthy," without specifying further.
The buyer reaction to Car Thing so far runs the gamut. Social media is dotted with both raves and regrets by people who got one off the waitlist. One Redditor mounted Car Thing to his Harley Davidson motorcycle and paired it to his Bluetooth headphones. Before Car Thing, switching tracks or adjusting volume was "nearly impossible" with his phone in his pocket and leather gloves on.
But others have complained Car Thing was overpriced even when it was $80.
Suda, the Spotify power user who scored Car Thing early and free, is still using the gadget every time he drives, nine months later. He's noticed that Car Thing's software has gotten zippier. "To me, it just makes it easier to listen and it's actually safer, if you don't have CarPlay or any of that fancy stuff," he said.
In 2019, when Spotify revealed its first iteration of Car Thing, it also brought to light the possibility of a "Voice Thing" and "Home Thing." It was hardware that never materialized. Still, "it wasn't vaporware," Söderström said. "I've tried it. But it's not something we're launching right now." Spotify declined to comment on what its next thing in hardware would be. Regardless, they should definitely code-name it Next Thing.
And if Next Thing is ever to become a Real Thing, Spotify must pray Car Thing follows the roadmap of Kindle rather than Zune.
