Software and silicon chips make digital radios a bit more like handheld computers every day. With microprocessor capabilities perpetually expanding, radio manufacturers can pack ever more features into each model. That’s the lesson of the latest upgrade to Motorola’s MOTOTRBO line of digital radios and communications gear, which makes several subtle enhancements to the experience of using these devices. Release 2.4 features:

• IMPRES over-the-air battery management
• Text to speech
• User-selectable audio profiles
• Event-driven location updates.

Here’s a look at each of these features in a bit more depth. IMPRES over-the-air battery management With traditional portable radios, you never really know how much battery power you have left. So you have to carry extras or risk becoming incommunicado. You also never know how near your battery is to the end of its useful life. IMPRES confronted this challenge with hardware and software: IMPRES battery chargers connected to personal computers. The chargers can detect how much charge a battery is holding and how many more times it can be charged before it needs to be reconditioned. The charger relays this information to a networked PC, enabling a vast collection of batteries to be analyzed in real time, ensuring that workers’ radios never have to be hampered by poor batteries. With the Release 2.4 upgrade, this setup is no longer limited to wired PCs. Now battery data can be broadcast wirelessly from radios to nearby repeaters connected to networked PCs, allowing all IMPRES batteries to be tracked anywhere, anytime. Text to speech MOTOTRBO’s voice announcement feature allows radios to talk to their users, sending synthesized messages about the radio’s functions (akin to a car’s GPS unit telling the driver to turn right at the next street). This capability has been expanded to read text messages and covert them to vocalizations. That way you can still talk, in effect, to busy users who have no time to pick up their radio. Say you’re a supervisor needing to convene an emergency meeting of your warehouse staff in three hours. You can send everyone a text message with the exact location (which can be saved for later use), and the software will translate the text into a spoken message. That way, workers can keep doing their jobs and have a saved message to refer back to when it’s time for the meeting. User-selectable audio profiles No two MOTOTRBO users work in the same audio environment. Because a factory production line doesn’t sound anything like the sales floor of a department store, users would prefer that their radio speakers reproduce sound with specific enhancements. Motorola Solutions answered this need with user profiles that match common audio environments. Two ambience profiles (“loud” and “work group”) match sound output to the user’s setting. This is especially handy for users who work in multiple environments and need to switch from one kind of sound to another. Six personal profiles have names like “bass boost” to reshape the speaker’s tone. For instance, a noisy production line might require the “treble boost” setting to cut through background noise. Event-driven location updates GPS tracking in MOTOTRBO radios allows real-time tracking of every worker who has a radio turned on, which is an incredible boon to trucking company dispatchers and other professionals who need to know where their people are. Release 2.4 added a sophisticated GPS enhancement: the capability to send a message from a radio whenever something specific happens. It works like this: A sensor communicates with the radio via the accessory connector. Picture a sensor connecting a taxicab or school bus door to a radio. If the sensor sends a message to the dispatcher whenever a door opens, dispatchers have much more information about what’s happening out there on the streets. This, in turn, generates data that can be analyzed to identify logjams and streamline operations. It also can be helpful to first responders in case of an emergency. MOTOROLA, MOTOROLA SOLUTIONS and the Stylized M Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Motorola Trademark Holdings, LLC and are used under license. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2015 Motorola Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.