Microsoft Media Player (and more) for the car

Despite the Zune taking a 9.6% market share last month, Microsoft are moving forward with product development.

Apparently Microsoft have been seeking a patent for a computer-based audio device for a car.

Here's part of the abstract:

"A vehicle computer system has a housing sized to be mounted in a vehicle dashboard or other appropriate location, a computer mounted within the housing, and an open platform operating system which executes on an open hardware architecture computer. The open platform operating system supports multiple different applications that can be supplied by a vehicle user. For instance, the operating system can support applications pertaining to entertainment, navigation, communications, security, diagnostics, and others. The computer has one or more storage drive (e.g., CD drive, floppy disk drive, cassette player, or hard disk drive) which permits the vehicle user to download programs from a storage medium (e.g., CD, diskette, cassette, or hard disk) to the computer. In the described implementation, the computer has two independent processors."

The idea they've got is to bring together all the electronic devices in the car and putting them into one device. They talk about the secrutiy system, audio, navigation devices, telemetrics etc all being combined.

But there's so much more! The figure below shows the variety of devices they plan to include: