It's called "your phone," the Instant Pot of consumer electronics.īut people don't do this. Name aside, I have seen a lot of spicy hot takes about how you already have a device that plays Spotify through your phone in the car. "Car Thing" gets Pitchfork to write about it. That said, "Spotify Bluetooth Remote" would be destined for the Crutchfield catalog, page 232. When I think of The Thing, it's the beauty at the top of this email, the John Carpenter movie, or Ben Grimm (IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME.) It might not be the greatest name. Pitchfork's article on the gadget asks " What the Hell Is Spotify’s Tragically Named “Car Thing”? and opens with this line: "No, it's not a late April Fools gag." I'll stipulate this. It comes with a clip to mount the device on a vent, and, like your phone, requires a USB charger for power. Which means you now have two phone-like devices to find places for in your car, since the Car Thing looks exactly like a smartphone with a big dial on it. It still requires a Bluetooth connection to your phone to actually use Spotify. In fact, it really doesn't even do that, at least by itself. The "one thing" that the Car Thing does is provide an interface for Spotify in your car. It only did one thing, but I loved the thing it did. But until it stopped working, I always had the Slacker G2 in my travel bag. I totally get Slacker's decision to give up on the hardware business-by 2010 it was pretty clear that smartphones were going to eat audio players, GPS trackers, and pretty much anything else electronic you put in your pocket. Simple navigation, no buffering or skipping, and no wifi needed to listen. But if you were an existing Slacker subscriber (as I was), it was the best experience for listening to the service. It probably didn't sell a lot of new Slacker subscriptions. Not bad for 2008 (and a better audio device than the just-introduced Apple iPhone, which was then but a pale shadow of today's pocket supercomputer.) I wish it still worked. This was a Slacker G2 Player, which did one thing: everytime you synced it to your computer, it would cache streamable songs for up to 25 different user-created stations to the flash memory of this device, so you could take Slacker Radio with you on the go. Living in a tiny house in the sky as I do, I share Alton's disdain for kitchen gadgets that only have one limited purpose-there's just no room for them in my life (in fact, once we got an Instant Pot, we started to veer dangerously far in the other direction-on the right setting, could we wash our clothes in it? Would it raise the children?) But I will admit that I have owned my share of audio unitaskers. This week, Spotify announced the Car Thing, what Alton Brown would call a "unitasker." Like a cherry pitter, it does one thing well, and nothing else.
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