Meet Spotify first car gadget


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For the first time in its history, Spotify officially enters the world of hardware and announces a physical device made by it, which is designed for our vehicles, and has been given the very logical name Car Thing (or “Masho-auto”). Spotify also started a very limited sale of the product in the US in a tin that we would not refuse to accept – “Take the device for free, just pay $ 7 shipping”.

Spotify do not want to compete with your car console

Spotify wants to control your entire music experience in the car and with CarThing it will put a kind of “second console” (or first if you are in a really old car) in the car through which you can control all their music and podcasts you listen through the popular app.

Car Thing is built from a 4-inch touch screen and weighs a little less than 100 grams. It also includes four physical buttons at the top, for which you can designate specific actions and how we forgot – it also includes a huge dial on the right side, because this touch screen is not enough.

And if you do not want to touch it at all this is also not a problem, because Car Thing also works with voice commands. All you have to do is say “Hey Spotify” and ask your Car Thing to play a song, playlist, “radio station” (of a particular song, AA) or a podcast. Spotify boasts that your “such as a car” will understand you even when the volume is high and you are dancing in a traffic jam or when the window is open on a highway.

Car Thing can connect you to your car in several ways: on the air conditioner opening, on your disc player opening and on your dashboard, and it can play music in several ways: on Bluetooth or in a physical connection via an AUX cable or a USB cable. The device is charged via a USB-C cable that connects to a dedicated charger for the lighter that comes with it in the box.

Spotify’s Car Thing did not come out of nowhere and already about two years ago it was reported that it was considering the development of such a product under the same name. The product it introduced then included a small round screen and a few buttons, in what looked much more primitive than the product now coming out.

The new Spotify gadget, as mentioned, is available for free – but only for US residents, and only for those who are randomly selected by Spotify – with the only payment being for the shipping cost. Spotify will not give the ability to access the new device to anyone and only premium users will be able to try and get one to try it out.

In announcing the new product, Spotify explains that it is not trying to compete in any way with the existing media consoles in vehicles today – and rightly so. This is an experiment as part of Spotify’s strategy to produce as smooth a music listening experience as possible for its users, who can skip between playing on a smartphone just before entering the car, directly to play from the device without bothering to connect to the car’s console. The goal is for the new device to offer users much more listening options without messing with an external device like the smartphone – for example.