Hasta La Gadget!

We’ll be honest: apart from the ridiculous custom cars and the Viliv S7, we pretty much avoided the car audio-oriented North Hall at CES this year — which means we sadly didn’t get any facetime with Blaupunkt’s miRoamer-powered TravelPilot New Jersey 600i internet car stereo. (Apparently double-DIN is big in the Jerz.) The prototype head unit connects to a cellphone over Bluetooth to access the internet, and uses the miRoamer service to stream “tens of thousands” of stations on the service — which the company estimates will consume about 2GB of data a month, so you’d better hope your data plan doesn’t cap you off or charge you for overages. The radio is expected to arrive in the second half of the year for $399, which isn’t bad, but doesn’t do much good for the squares like us who never swap out their car stereos — which is probably why miRoamer is targeting 2010 for placement in OEM head units. One more pic of the single-DIN sized “Hamburg” model after the break.

Continue reading Blaupunkt shows off miRoamer-powered internet car radios

Filed under: Portable Audio, Transportation

Blaupunkt shows off miRoamer-powered internet car radios originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

We were really hoping to see some wild Android devices at CES, and while we did see one or two interesting applications, we sadly missed Compulab’s crazy exeda. Ostensibly designed for the enterprise market, the squared-off handheld features a 3.5-inch sun-readable VGA touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, and a capacitive touchpad that acts as a mouse. Like other recent Asian Android handsets we’ve seen, the exeda can also boot Windows Mobile 6.1 on its 520MHz Marvell CPU and 128MB of RAM, and the radio setup is similarly flexible — resellers can pick from quadband GSM / GPRS, CDMA, and 3G UMTS. Craziest of all? The exeda has a 10/100Base-T Ethernet port in addition to WiFi. Yeah, we want one. No details on pricing, but hopefully we’ll find out more when it hits in March.

[Thanks, James R.]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Compulab unveils the exeda Android / WinMo handheld originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Ever have a cable you wanted to strangle? Well you’re not alone, apparently. A company called E-Filliate issued a new series of USB, HDMI, Cat5, S-Video, and composite cables called Flexicord at CES this year which will bend — and stay — in any position you please, thus eliminating that frustration you must feel every time you plug in your camera or hook up your high fidelity sound system. The cables act like pipe cleaner or Gumby, so you can twist and shape them as you please, though apparently Pokey had to be killed and dissected so the technology could be obtained. Enjoy your new cable, murderers.

[Via Everything USB]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Flexicord cables get bent… and stay that way originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

We’ve been hearing an awful lot about NVIDIA’s Ion platform, but up until now, we haven’t seen an awful lot. HotHardware and PC Perspective were both able to swing by NVIDIA’s booth at CES and get an up close look at the diminutive system. On hand was a half-liter PC that utilized a 1.6GHz Atom 330 CPU and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M GPU, and it was reportedly being used to push some pretty stellar video on the monitors behind it. Have a look past the break for a couple demonstration vids — if this is the kind of graphical prowess we can expect from nettops of tomorrow, you can color us interested.

Read – HotHardware
Read – PC Perspective

Continue reading NVIDIA Ion platform gets demonstrated at CES

Filed under: Laptops

NVIDIA Ion platform gets demonstrated at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

This unassuming little tablet somehow managed to slip under our radar at CES, but the folks at UMPC Portal did thankfully manage to snap a few pics of it, and dig up a few details. Dubbed the Q1EX, this followup / compliment to Samsung’s Q1 series of UMPCs ditches the usual QWERTY keypad in favor of a full-on 7-inch touchscreen, and gets backed up by a VIA Nano processor, along with built-in Bluetooth, GPS, and WiMAX, among other standard tablet PC features. Unfortunately, there’s no word on a price or release date just yet, but if Samsung’s past track record with the Q1 is any indication, you can expect to see a whole slew of different incarnations before all is said and done.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

Samsung Q1EX tablet shows itself, gets detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments