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Delphi Automotive Systems
Another cool product that is used in conjunction with your Palm V/Vx and Ericsson 280/1228D mobile phone, is the Communiport MPCpro. The unit is installed into your car and allows full voice recognition capabilities with your Palm, which can in turn interact with your cell phone (Note: It has to be an Ericsson 280/1228D phone). The MPCpro allows text-to-speech as well as speech recognition and is set on your dashboard or on your windshield. It can read to-do lists, date books, or e-mail messages, as well as dial a requested phone number. I asked how accurate the voice recognition was, and Delphi's representative told me that with a PDA that had over 400 names stored, it rarely got anything wrong.
This is a cool product, but personally I wouldn't spend my money on it, although I did not get a chance to demo the product to actually see if it really was capable of. Delphi showed the unit in a new Lexus:
Nice car |
A little hard to see |
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Imation
I didn't even know Imation was making any new products other than storage media, but it looks they have quite a product lined targeted towards consumers and making use of our new digital age. They had 3 products that were just released that they are really pushing.
The first product we'll talk about is called the RipGO! The RipGO! plays mini CD-R disks in MP3 and WMA formats. It's basically an MP3 CD player, but in the mini CD-R format, so it allows the same sort of convenience in terms of size as a normal MP3 player. A mini CD-R will record about 3 hours of CD quality music. That's not all though, the actual unit is also the recorder, so there's no need for anything extra to make the CD's. Just in case any of you are wondering, mini CD's do play in your normal CD drive. The RipGO! should be available in September for a retail price of $399.99.
The RipGO! |
Next on the lineup is FlashGO! I think this product is great and a definite best buy. Some of you have seen flash memory card readers, but they are actual drives, they are bulky, and who wants another big thing to take up precious room. Imation used the same idea, made a small USB flash memory card reader/writer that supports Compact Flash (Type I and II), Smart Media, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, and IBM's microdrive. That's pretty impressive considering it's just a little unit that sticks out of your USB port when you need to use it. This is also great if you have numerous products using various (or even the same kind) of flash memory, rather than installing drivers for each product, you only use this one. A representative told me that future formats would be supported as well.
The FlashGO! |
Last is a 20GB tape drive which you can use for backups. The special thing about this is that it uses the Firewire or 1394 format which is very very fast. Not much more to say about this, but here's a shot:
Travan Firewire |
I was also shown a new product called the DiscGO!, but it is not stated for release until Q4. First let me show you the picture:
The DiscGO! |
See how small the disk is? It stores 500MB! We can't wait for this to come out, especially to see other uses for the format. Will this be able to blow flash memory cards out of the water?
Related Links:
>> Eizo/Panasonic/PC-EPhone
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