Author |Third Young Master
Edit |Zhang Xiangwei
I think it takes three years to see if we are right or wrong to make mobile phones. 」
A few days ago, Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of Weilai, said in response to a question that the input and output of the mobile phone project itself does take three years, and when Huawei, Xiaomi, and even Apple, all these mobile phone giants, sell more and more their cars, everyone will know its significance.
Since the release of Weilai's mobile phone products in September this year, Wei's self-developed mobile phones have been questioned by some people as not doing business, and the stock price performance has been relatively weak.
However, the author believes that the reason why Weilai continues to exert its strength in the field of mobile phones despite the financial pressure and the criticism of everyone is because Brother Bin and Mr. Lihong deeply understand the truth of "those who travel a hundred miles are half ninety", and because in the next one to two years, Weilai is very expected to becomeA new benchmark in the field of driver connectivity
Can this bright vision be realized?There are only three questions to answer:
First, what are the underlying technology stacks involved in driver connectivity?Second, what are the current difficulties in the interconnection of drivers?Third, why was NIO able to overcome these challenges?Putting aside the dazzle of each **evaluation**, to sum up, we will find that,Digital car keys, cross-terminal migration of services, and hardware collaboration between vehicles and mobile phonesIt is the three typical application scenarios of driver interconnection.
After discovering a car based on the same account system through near-field broadcasting, the digital car key can provide a high-end experience with a sense of technological luxury, such as welcoming guests in the car and unlocking without feeling
The well-known navigation and seamless flow of services have been realized by relying on the relay of applications
Use the mobile phone as a game controller, play games on the car screen, or make ** calls through the cellular network + car camera of the mobile phone, which is equivalent to forming a super terminal through the collaboration of multiple devices to achieve a more immersive game and social experience.
The number one role of driver connectivity is to enable fast connectivity.
Regardless of the application scenario, the first step in driver connectivity is to quickly establish a connection between the phone and the car based on near-field communication.
At present, the NFC commonly used by many car companies is mainly NFC, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and UWB is still a niche. With the entry of NIO, UWB has been carried forward and gradually recognized by the automotive industry.
The next to join this camp is the NearLink Starlight, which will be installed on Huawei cars on a large scale.
The fast connection between devices is achieved through a distributed soft bus (a concept proposed by Huawei HarmonyOS or a cross-device mutual line (the concept of Xiaomi Surging OS). In the face of different communication media and communication protocols (NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi, UWB, and Starlight, which were mentioned above), the soft bus can shield developers from the differences caused by different communication media and communication protocols, realize heterogeneous networking, and establish multiple communication links.
Therefore, the essence of heterogeneous networking is that there are multiple trusted communication links between devices at the same time, and the devices can independently select the most suitable communication link according to the message size, network status, and device status, and transmit data to the other device, so as to achieve a balance between power consumption and performance.
In the process of networking, each device will identify the account information of the device to be networked, so as to realize the trusted interconnection of cross-devices based on the same account system, and at the same time, the device will report its own supported hardware resources to form a unified "hardware capability resource pool" to realize the sharing of hardware resources.
After a fast connection, it can also lead to efficient data flow.
Connecting and networking is equivalent to laying the highway for information communication between devices, but without "traffic lights", "lane markings", and "traffic rules", the highway cannot function normally. In order for information and data to flow freely across devices, multiple devices in the network need to share the same set of cross-device communication protocols.
In view of the earliest advent of HarmonyOS and the most complete information, readers and friends have heard more or less about its technical principles and concepts, so we still take HarmonyOS as an example to illustrate how the cross-device flow of data is realized.
HarmonyOS provides two subsystems, distributed data management and distributed task scheduling, at the system service layer, both of which are mentioned aboveCross-device connectivity protocols".
Taking the navigation flow of mobile phones and car machines as an example, after the map application initiates the relay, with the support of distributed data management, the mobile phone stores the data in the distributed database, and then activates the corresponding map application on the vehicle and machine side through distributed task scheduling.
In this process, if the mobile phone uses Huawei's petal map, the car machine will call the petal map, and if the mobile phone uses AutoNavi map, the car machine will call the AutoNavi map.
The in-vehicle map application then recovers the data from the distributed database and continues the navigation service. After getting out of the car, the same logic will be followed when the car machine will transfer the navigation to the mobile phone again.
Finally, connected drivers can also lead to hardware synergy.
Last month, at the pre-sale conference of Zhijie S7, Yu Chengdong mentioned that the AEB that has been widely discussed by everyone is just a piece of cake, 'a piece of cake'. To borrow Mr. Yu's statement here, navigation and the flow of ** are just a piece of cake in the application of driver interconnection.
The larger purpose of the driver interconnection is to integrate the two independent terminals of the mobile phone and the car machine into a super terminal to achieve the effect of 1+1 2, so as to unlock more application scenarios.
HyperTerminal relies on hardware collaborationThe technology behind it is distributed scheduling and distributed hardware. As mentioned above, when a device is networked, each device reports its own hardware resources and services, forming a virtualized hardware resource pool that can be called by each device.
As for how the local device can call the remote hardware like the local hardware, taking the HarmonyOS as an example, it provides a hardware driver framework called HDF, and the drivers of all devices follow the HDF specification.
In this way, for the device, whether the hardware is local or remote, the same driver will be called, but you can set the remote or local attribute in the function parameters.
Through the analysis of the underlying technology stack of driver interconnection, we can understand that in order to get on the car on a large scale, we need to overcome two major difficulties.
The first obstacle is that the interconnection protocol is not uniform across devices.
Whether it's fast interconnection, secure communication based on the account system, or application relay and device collaboration, these cross-device interconnection functions are implemented on private protocols.
Huawei has HarmonyOS Connect (upgraded from the previous HiLink), Xiaomi has HyperConnect, Meizu has Flyme Link, NIO has NIO Link, and vivo has BlueXlink.
This fragmentation of the ecosystem cannot be bridged by a single executive order.
Because, whether it is fast discovery and connection or cross-terminal service flow, these capabilities are provided by these various operating systems in the form of SDKs or APIs for upper-layer applications, which means that if you want to support the interconnection with HarmonyOS devices, you need to integrate Huawei's SDK, and if you want to transfer cross-device with Xiaomi's devices, you need to use the APIs provided by Xiaomi.
The end result is: choose one and reject the others, and you can't have both.
There is also a problem, the installation problem of cross-end applications.
More than 100 years ago, Mr. Hu Shi once said, "Talk more about problems and less about doctrines." 」
If the distributed capabilities of the operating system are compared to an ism, then each application that supports cross-terminal migration and multi-terminal collaboration is used to solve one specific problem after another. Even if the mobile phone market has an unprecedented leading big brother who has almost monopolized all the shares, how to ensure that the application on the mobile phone is consistent with the application on the car machine?
Looking at the essence of the problem, what users want is not the entity of "application", but the "services and functions" that it can provide. What users want is not the ability to "relay applications", but the experience of "services can be migrated across devices".
For example, if a consumer holds a mobile phone loaded with a map and a car equipped with AutoNavi Map, although both map applications support automatic navigation flow, in the distributed database mentioned above, the data between different applications is isolated from each other. Excuse me, how do you "relay" between these two map apps without being able to access the data of the other app?How to continue the navigation service?
The reason why NIO has a bright future at NIO Phone is because it is solving these two major problems.
It is based on the in-depth study of the driver's interconnection technology stack and the professional judgment of the difficulties faced in realizing the deep interconnection that NIO chose to make its own mobile phone in the face of criticism.
The advantage of self-developed mobile phones is that they can be subtractedReduce development effort
Compared with mobile phone manufacturers and friends who have the dual identity of "mobile phone manufacturers + car companies", NIO's advantage is that it can do subtraction. It only needs to face the subdivision scenario of the interconnection of cars and mobile phones to achieve its own goals.
In contrast, mobile phone manufacturers are facing the full-scene ecology of the Internet of Everything, and they are running towards the sea of stars, so they have to do addition, just in terms of device connection and networking, they have to support Bluetooth, WiFi, UWB, NFC and other protocols at the same time.
NIO only needs to use UWB as the "soft bus" communication medium for driver interconnection, which can achieve stronger anti-interference than Bluetooth, higher positioning accuracy than Bluetooth and WiFi, and lower power consumption than Bluetooth and WiFi.
Second, NIO canHelp users eliminate selectivity difficulties
Back then, Zhang Wuji couldn't sleep all night in the face of Zhao Min, Zhou Zhiruo, and Xiao Zhao, and for a while, he didn't know how to choose. Now, for the "car-only peers", their consumers also face double choice difficulties in multiple mobile phone manufacturers and multiple applications.
NIO Link, a cross-terminal near-field communication protocol, establishes a unified communication standard between the mobile phone and the vehicle, and then pre-installs a unified application on the mobile phone and the vehicle.
At the Weilai ** year-end communication meeting just held, in response to some friends' doubts about the existence of Weilai mobile phones, the logic given by Brother Bin is that "the natural information flow of mobile phones and cars is very demanding". The author deeply agrees with this judgment.
However, just as the demand for high-end intelligent driving by high-end car consumers was detonated by Huawei, which has a huge amount of traffic, only when Huawei's cars are sold more and more, and Xiaomi cars are sold more and more, can consumers truly realize how important the experience of deep driver interconnection is, and can also truly understand the ultimate purpose of Weilai to build mobile phones in person.
What day is it?Brother Bin's statement is "I'll see it in three years". Perhaps, we don't have to wait that long before we suddenly realize that NIO Phone is gradually becoming the new benchmark in the field of driver connectivity.