As a limited launch, you'll have to join a waiting list and hope you get chosen. Unfortunately, it's probably going to be tough to actually get your hands on a free Car Thing. While the Car Thing is currently a limited product launch, Spotify said it would be giving away the normally-$80 device for free to select Spotify listeners, who will only pay for shipping. Indeed, we didn't even know for sure what it looks like, apart from a promotional image that Spotify shared when it was first announced - and any users who might have one don't appear to have shared any reviews or photos on social media.Spotify last month unveiled its cheekily named Car Thing, a smart music player you can clip to your dashboard for voice-activated access to playlists and podcasts. Since the gadget was first announced, Spotify hasn't said anything about the Car Thing or the results of its test in public. It also has voice controls so you don't have to look down to pause a track. That came as a disappointment to some Spotify users, who were excited at the prospect of buying a Car Thing for themselves: It has a built-in 4G/LTE modem to stream music without pairing to a phone, and it has a cache so that the music doesn't stop when reception cuts out. In other words, Spotify said, it had no plans to get into hardware. The idea, Spotify said, was to give it to a select few users as a way to test how they listen to music and podcasts in the car, to give the company more data for future products and services. Spotify first announced the Car Thing in May, but said it was a prototype and that it had no plans to mass-produce it for consumers.

We finally know more about Spotify's long-discussed Car Thing - a voice-activated music-streaming gadget intended for the car (naturally), representing the music-streaming service's first foray into hardware.

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