Future BMW vehicles will come with an integrated Samsung tablet

At CES this week, BMW showed off a couple near-future technologies that’ll be available on cars in the next few years. The first doesn’t really sound futuristic at all — it’s just a generic Samsung tablet, but the magic is in how tightly BMW’s managed to integrate it with the car’s systems. The “Touch Command” system includes the small Android tablet and a dock in the rear seat, allowing rear passengers to change climate settings, switch radio stations, adjust their seats and more — in other words, it’s basically a portable iDrive controller for when you’re getting chauffeured around. The most interesting thing about it is that the tablet is customized by Samsung for BMW: pressing the home button doesn’t kick you out to the home screen on a normal Android device, it returns you to Touch Command’s main screen. If you want to use the tablet simply as an Android tablet — which you can do — you need to choose the “Apps” option inside Touch Command to get kicked out to a launcher. BMW says it hasn’t settled on a tablet model or size yet for when Touch Command reaches production, but it’ll take a year or two anyway.