i3 review, Remote App for iOS
Dec. 1st, 2014 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutWell, there is not a ton to the app. And you have to have a BMW Assist contract to get access (this is not obvious! And I couldn't find paperwork for that contract, for that matter, tho I had it bundled in the price of the car). I finally thought to contact the sales guy and ask him what account credentials it was asking for and he looked them up. It took me a while to even figure out it was BMW Assist that was involved.
Anyway. Through the app it is extremely simple to program departure times (once/recurring) for preconditioning/charging, which is what I really wanted to be able to do. It also lets you monitor the progress of charging, find your car on a map, etc. It is pretty and it has a passcode. Not much more to say about it at this time; if I use the GPS stuff, I may blog about it, if it turns out I can do things like program my next destination while sitting in bed the night before. But I don't know for sure if that is possible . . .
ETA: Oh. My. God. I can honk the horn of my car from my phone. This _could_ be useful, if I were trying to find it in a particularly large parking lot? But mostly it is just stupidly silly. I find it particularly amusing that it has a little graphic to show you that the app is sending to the server (icon is a cylinder) and then the server sends to the car. And then the horn honks.
ETA Still more: Okay, turns out buying LoJack for this car would be approximately the stupidest thing you could ever waste your money on, because with the cell phone in it, it is pre-lojacked. Really, it is just like driving your cell phone or connected laptop. Anyway. Once you turn on geolocation (open question what the privacy implications of _that_ are), you can do all kinds of fun routing things: route on foot or public transport to or from your vehicle to a final destination. You can also access destinations you have previously programmed into the car. You can also send to the car as a destination any address in your contacts. There are surely additional things you can do that I haven't figured out yet (it'll also tell you if that destination is in range). I'd kinda like to figure out whether it can produce a range estimate on a multiple stop trip (home to point A to point B then back home, say -- go to work, pick up stuff at the store, come back home, type of thing).
Anyway. Through the app it is extremely simple to program departure times (once/recurring) for preconditioning/charging, which is what I really wanted to be able to do. It also lets you monitor the progress of charging, find your car on a map, etc. It is pretty and it has a passcode. Not much more to say about it at this time; if I use the GPS stuff, I may blog about it, if it turns out I can do things like program my next destination while sitting in bed the night before. But I don't know for sure if that is possible . . .
ETA: Oh. My. God. I can honk the horn of my car from my phone. This _could_ be useful, if I were trying to find it in a particularly large parking lot? But mostly it is just stupidly silly. I find it particularly amusing that it has a little graphic to show you that the app is sending to the server (icon is a cylinder) and then the server sends to the car. And then the horn honks.
ETA Still more: Okay, turns out buying LoJack for this car would be approximately the stupidest thing you could ever waste your money on, because with the cell phone in it, it is pre-lojacked. Really, it is just like driving your cell phone or connected laptop. Anyway. Once you turn on geolocation (open question what the privacy implications of _that_ are), you can do all kinds of fun routing things: route on foot or public transport to or from your vehicle to a final destination. You can also access destinations you have previously programmed into the car. You can also send to the car as a destination any address in your contacts. There are surely additional things you can do that I haven't figured out yet (it'll also tell you if that destination is in range). I'd kinda like to figure out whether it can produce a range estimate on a multiple stop trip (home to point A to point B then back home, say -- go to work, pick up stuff at the store, come back home, type of thing).