Automatica Cloud-Syncing Audio Dongle

So you have gigabytes of audio in your computer and cloud storage accounts? And you are a serial music downloader of sorts and love listening to your collection night and day! But when you go for a drive, you hate having to carry your music in a puny pen drive and fiddling with it all the time. And even if you do, you despise having to update it again and again. You miss having the luxury of readily choosing from the vast ocean of your collection. Problem? Help’s at hand! 

Enter Inrete, a company which develops intuitive connected car technologies. Headquartered in Italy, Inrete has introduced Automatica, the first cloud-syncing audio dongle for cars. It’s a device that plugs into your vehicle’s USB port and provides media content straight from your personal cloud storage account and podcast channels, enables you to create and organise your content and play them in your car.

In short, you can gain access to whatever media you put in Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Microsoft SkyDrive, SoundCloud or even YouTube while on the move! All you need is a Wi-Fi connection for the device to access your cloud storage account. Through this connection, Automatica creates a local cache of your contents and stores 24 hours of audio within its internal flash memory. If that’s less for you, the storage capacity can be expanded with the help of a MicroSD slot in the device. 

Once the Wi-Fi is set up, there is no need to connect Automatica to a computer; the connection itself allows real-time automatic audio content updates. The device establishes a connection with the Wi-Fi available at your parked space as well as your smartphone Wi-Fi.

Setting-up is user friendly too with an initial personalisation feature via the Automatica website where the user can choose the podcasts and cloud services they want to associate to the device. The device is easily read by the vehicles entertainment system as it is recognised as a normal USB memory stick. 

"This plug and play device allows for users that have a USB port in their vehicle to enjoy instant audio content – without any further modifications to the vehicle.” states Giorgio Bernardi, President of Inrete. “Our goal is to simplify this process by making it easy to use, yet make it personal for each user with our online interface”.

Inrete’s Automatica is available for pre-order now via their website for $99. Add $42 for shipping to Asia and the total comes out to be $141 (approximately Rs 8,600 according to current exchange rates). Seems like a good deal? We think so.

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