Meet the Jaguar/Land Rover smartphone

Jaguar Land Rover has announced a whole new host of apps that'll be available in vehicles by both brands later this year via the InControl smartphone integration system. With the help of Bosch and a number of third-party app developers, Jaguar and Land Rover will debut integrated in-vehicle app connectivity for phones with the Android operating system, as well as for Apple's iOS.

Jaguar Land Rover is the latest company to bring apps to cars' infotainment systems, an innovation that will either greatly reduce distracted driving and make crucial information much more easily accessible or cause drivers to completely ignore the act of driving altogether.

Here's some of what will be offered when InControl apps launch in JLR cars and SUVs:

Clear Channel's iHeartRadio digital music service has become one of the most popular radio station apps, with access to 1,500 live radio stations. The InControl interface in Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles will allow seamless access to music and talk radio, with a safety-minded interface that's engineered for the in-car environment.

Stitcher is a another radio app for smartphones that gives talk radio and podcast fans an easier way to find and listen to more than 20,000 news, talk, and sports stations from media outlets like NPR, Fox, BBC, and the Wall Street Journal. If you want to read the news (or rather, have it read to you), InControl will also feature Airmotion's News on Board app, a service that reads the news out loud so that drivers don't have to squint at their phone while sitting in traffic. A related app that will also have the ability to read the news out loud is Winston, a voice recognition app which will also double as a personal assistant.

Jaguar
InControl smartphone integration will be available in 2014.

Another app that's been recently making waves is Glympse, which is a temporary location sharing technology that allows two cars to link up their navigation systems to share each other's location in real time via GPS. This will allow you to follow your friends along on multicar road trips, or to simply check your friends' progress when en route to a destination. Glympse hopes that this app will eliminate the constant "Where are you now?" phone calls.

Jaguar and Land Rover drivers will also be able to access Parkopedia directly through the infotainment system, an app that's the world's leading parking information provider used by millions of drivers every month to find parking spaces near their destinations. The app's database has info on more than 28 million parking spaces in 40 countries around the world.

In addition to radio and GPS apps, Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles will also feature Hotelseeker/Citiseeker hotel booking service.

"Our new InControl Apps platform delivers on our vision to provide customers access to familiar, branded third party applications from their smartphones safely and conveniently in their vehicles," said Nick Gionis, chief engineer of infotainment at Jaguar Land Rover.

Jaguar says InControl will be available in both Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles in 2014.

By Jay Ramey