iOS 8 has given Apple a chance to showcase what it has in the pipeline for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users, as has been noted ad nauseam by commentators throughout the blogosphere, the Cupertino outfit has borrowed quite a few long-standing Android features in creating this very appealing software update. But while the likes of third-party keyboard support and widgets have been available over at the Google Play Store for a good few years now, it looks as though Apple will also be grabbing one of its major adversary’s newer quirks in the form of Google Now’s find my car feature.
Even though Apple sparked that initial fanfare with the introduction of Siri, it’s scarcely arguable that Google Now is a much more established and generally useful product. Google has busily been integrating the voice-based functionality into every product it creates – including, of course, Project Glass – and one of the more exciting features of the voice search / assistant is the recently-introduced ‘find my car’.
As the name suggests, find my car helps a user to find their parked car among a deluge of others, and given how frequently we head up to the mall and forget where we’ve placed our automobiles, it’s far from a gimmick. In fact, it has proven to be rather useful for those who’ve tested it out, and from iOS 8 onwards, it would seem that iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users will be able to enjoy comparable functionality.
As pointed out by firmware forensic Hamza Sood (source: 9to5Mac), the inaugural iOS 8 beta reveals “parking pin” features, which could integrate with Apple Maps and allow a user to take note of the precise location they left their car. From there, the cumbersome rigmarole of locating a car after a day of hard shopping, coffee-drinking or movie-watching wouldn’t be marred by the predictable ten-minute car hunt, and instead, the your iPhone would do the remembering for you.
Whether it will be ready in time for iOS 8 or arrive in a further update is, like many hidden treasures within the iOS 8 beta code, currently unknown, but given how the forthcoming firmware is already touting itself as an all-round problem-solver of common issues, this would certainly be a welcome feature to the fold.
Thoughts?
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