Motorola Reintroduces "Car Phones"

Here's an odd one: Motorola is hawking one of its new mobiles as car phone. It doesn't have more than GPS and a navigation application, but it's almost so ridiculous that it whips all the way back to clever. What car phone wouldn't have GPS these days? (Also, why does my rental car's Garmin unit pronounce the abbreviation "St" as "Saint?" That seems like a basic one to get right.

Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) today announced the debut of the Motorola Smart Rider™ phone, an innovative in-vehicle solution featuring GPS navigation, interactive voice activation, Bluetooth™ wireless technology and exceptional audio quality that's sure to make this phone an integral part of every driver's journey. A unique hands-free solution, the Smart Rider phone uses GSM technology to enhance user experience by ensuring that users can converse, navigate and tend to business while on-the-go.

Press Release [Jalopnik]

[#1 posted by kirbyk , April 3, 2008 5:35 PM]

Well, it's not as easy as it sounds. St is a common abbreviation in addresses, and it means two different things. It could be Saint (Saint Louis) or Street (Main Street), and even both at once (Saint George Street).

One thing I learned from 3+ years as a software engineer at Whitepages.com - it's not possible to programatically parse US addresses with 100% accuracy. What does 100 S N mean, is it 100 South N street, or 100 S North street? 100 Green Drive - is the street named Green, or named Green Drive? (There are many streets with 'street types' that are actually part of the name.) You can get to the 80/20 ratio easily, and even up to the 90s with some work, but it's not a system that's programatically solvable.

Which isn't to say that St meaning Saint is the right choice over street if you had to pick just one - it's not. (I'd probably do a heuristic where it's Street if it's at the end of the address and Saint elsewhere.) (Not the TV show.)

Hmm, don't miss that job. :-)

[#2 posted by Anonymous , April 4, 2008 12:48 PM]

Well, yes, there's a Saint George Street here in Toronto; I remember hearing that at least twenty years ago as an example of why text-to-speech translation wasn't necessarily easy.

And yes, there's a Victoria Park Avenue here, with 'Victoria Park' being the name and 'Avenue' the street type... all the more confusing in that just across the municipal border is Victoria Park where 'Victoria' is the name and 'Park' is the street type.

Then again, there was the Bellevue-Redmond area in Washington State where the placement of the 'quadrant' of the street depended on which direction the street was going... so you would have things like '9400 NE 103rd St' and '10300 94th Ave NE'.