July 27, 2006, 9:35 PM PDT
Top Traffic Toys
Posted by: Brian Cooley

Did you see my Top Traffic Toys segment on NBC's Today Show? Here are the things I talked about:

Before you leave the house . . .

- You've got a computer and a broadband connection -- use them. Your local TV news departments are all in a death battle to outdo each other with the best traffic maps and cameras. And while there are national traffic sources, nobody does traffic like a local TV station. So check their web sites.

- No time to look at anything? Well, if you have XM or Sirius satellite radio in your house remember that both have dedicated traffic & weather channels for the major metro areas around the U.S. A lot of their subscribers forget about that. Turn it on for the last 5-10 minutes before you head out the door and you should be up to speed -- without having to use your eyeballs.

Once you're in the car . . .

- The Garmin C550 is one good example of a great GPS nav device with live traffic. It has the compact "mini TV" form factor that is taking the sector by storm, and doubles as a handsfree speakerphone and MP3 player. It's not cheap (Almost $800, plus $60/year for traffic service), but it's one of the best and can easily be moved from car to car.

- Pioneer's AVIC Z1 is very much a top drawer piece. It's an in-dash entertainment, navigation and traffic powerhouse. What I love is its unusual ability to learn your favorite back streets as it notices you take them consistently -- other nav units just opt for the same predictable streets and highways every time. List price on this monster is over $2,200, but I see some CNET merchants have it for less than $1,600 -- plus a $4-$10 additional monthly fee for the traffic data via XM.

- The TrafficGauge is as simple at the AVIC Z-1 is complex. This thing looks like a PDA, but with virtually no buttons to push. It's just on, showing freeway traffic in your metro area. No zoom, no navigation, no text. Just the basics. It's uniquely suited to the technophobic. The price is right at around $80, plus a $5-$7 monthly subscription. Only works in S.F., L.A. and Seattle right now, but most major cities are promised soon.

Everywhere else . . .

- The Verizon/Samsung SCH-A990 is a good example of what today's broadband enabled phones can do. It supports the VZ Navigator service, which turns the phone into a sort of poor man's Garmin C550. The graphical navigation directions and text traffic alerts arrive via different applications within the phone, but that's not a bad trade off once you learn the shortcuts to access each easily. Customized traffic alerts cost either a few cents each or a few bucks a month, depending on your plan. Navigation is $10 a month or $3 per use.

- Google just added traffic data to their Google Mobile service. If you don't have a J2ME (Java) enabled phone, you can tune out now. But a lot of phones do have J2ME, which means they can run this free navigation and traffic program. Its the best example today of where phones are heading as they seek to clobber the standalone navigation & traffic devices. Like most Google services, it's free (yes, I too am waiting for the other shoe to drop on all these Google freebies), but will gobble up data so make sure your wireless plan has a either a lot or unlimited amount of it.

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January 30, 2006, 4:33 PM PST
Crappy Cruzer
Posted by: Brian Cooley

Oh, yeah, I just had to be soooo ambitious. After about a year of enjoying flawless performance from a couple of cheapo USB drives I got free at trade shows, I had to go out and buy a "really good one": A Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512MB. Its a great product. Just ask us. A 9.0 CNET Rating. Amazing. Makes an iPod look like something from a flea market. Too bad it doesn't work. Dead. After a mere 6 weeks of use. And I babied the damned thing, carrying it in its own little compartment in my briefcase, never dropping it. And for that it rewards me with a "USB Device Not Recognized" error when I pop it into any XP machine. A call to Sandisk tech support lead to the almost instant issuance of an RMA #, which I would normally laud as fabulous customer service except I suspect it means they get a lot of these returned and its just a well-oiled reaction. They had no ideas how to get the OS to recognize it even one more time so I could rescue my files. So they want me to return it -- with my files trapped on it. Uhhmmmm, no. Those files are business documents and I don't need to be wondering if some clever geek at Sandisk knows how to resurrect dead Cruzers, thereby unlocking my mundane but nonetheless private documents and plans for the next few months of my official duties at Editor at Large. Not worth it. So the thing will remain buried in my desk drawer forever, a silent reminder to myself to never again trust a USB drive as primary storage -- and to attend more trade shows so I can stock up on those freebie USB drives, the good ones. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have about a megabyte of Word docs to recreate from memory.

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November 08, 2005, 7:41 AM PST
Yahoo! Shakes Its Booty
Posted by: Brian Cooley

As I stepped out of my cab and into the SEMA show in Vegas, a booming PA system greeted me with the invocation "Whoa, check out Tiffany -- that's a battery-operated booty!" Sure enough, Tiffany and her cohorts did appear to have battery-operated booties, dominating the tone of the vast area outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was all part of the Yahoo! Custom Autos booth where many pierced, tattooed and mouth-breathing young men stared for hours as Tiffany and Co. carried out their pantomine of carnal instincts on a high platform. Clearly, Yahoo! nailed the tuner vibe on its first try. Normally one has to attend a cockfight to enjoy such an atmosphere.

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November 08, 2005, 7:35 AM PST
NBA Ride.
Posted by: Brian Cooley

Toyota showed a pretty cool NBA-style Matrix at the SEMA show in Vegas. Aside from all the usual Pimp My Ride electronics, it sported a cleverly styled interior featuring polished hardwood floors and basketball-textured seat upholstery. To even have a hope of getting an NBA player to fit in it, Toyota removed the B pillars and gave the little Matrix vertical opening scissor doors.

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November 08, 2005, 7:19 AM PST
I Don't Get This.
Posted by: Brian Cooley

Never have. The offroading rock climbing thing. They had a course set up outside the SEMA show in Vegas. The idea is to simulate the challenges of driving over boulders and rocks with a highly modified all-wheel drive vehicle. Is this considered a sport? A hobby? What? It has no real world application, you could just walk this terrain instead and barely break a sweat -- the presence of the spotter underlines the absurdity of it all quite nicely.

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November 08, 2005, 7:09 AM PST
Lovely Seat Cover
Posted by: Brian Cooley

This may be the most horrendous seat cover I have ever seen. Its a frog & lilly pad motif that I mistook for a vomiting parrot the first three times I walked by. It must be a first of some kind: A seat cover with an embroidered protruberance that could very well block your rearward vision.

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November 08, 2005, 6:53 AM PST
Nissan's Pod
Posted by: Brian Cooley

At the SEMA show, Nissan showed a concept car called the Actic. Its totally based on interactive technologies, the heart of which is this pod that functions as the car key while also holding your MP3 library, navigation preferences, and a slew of automotive preferences. You click this pod into the dashboard and all the above are tailored to you.

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November 02, 2005, 11:00 AM PST
The on-car TV antenna slims down
Posted by: Brian Cooley

You can get satellite TV in your car today, but it requires a huge, ugly antenna on the roof. However, this week at the SEMA show in Las Vegas antenna maker KVH unveiled a low-profile on-car DBS (Dish Network) antenna that hides under a fairly sleek fairing, seen in the center of this picture. Unlike the current antenna partially seen in the foreground, this new low-profile unit would be offered as a factory option by carmakers. None have announced they will integrate it just yet. And look for yet another generation of such antennas next year that should be entirely invisible, wedged between the headliner and the car's roof. Both KVH and competitor RaySat are making thinly veiled references to such products arriving in 2006. That's when carmakers will finally get interested.

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November 02, 2005, 10:49 AM PST
Dockable in-car DVD
Posted by: Brian Cooley

Now this makes sense. At the SEMA show in Vegas this week, Visteon is crowing about its dockable in-car DVD system. It functions as a rear-seat entertainment system when in the car, or you can unlatch the entire unit, and it becomes a standard portable DVD player you can use on a plane, in a hotel room, wherever. This is a system that could address that hesitancy new car buyers have about in-car video systems that tend to be very pricey options, yet are usable only in the car and when you have someone in the backseat who actually wants to watch video. A dockable system such as this delivers many more usage cases for the same amount of investment.

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November 02, 2005, 10:39 AM PST
The new wave in nav
Posted by: Brian Cooley

At the SEMA show in Vegas this week, Pioneer is showing off its next-generation all-in-one head unit: the Z1. It will combine all the usual high-end entertainment options, but what is most interesting is its navigation portion. This unit will run off an internal hard drive as opposed to the usual DVD. That means far richer map displays, interactive POIs, and a system that can learn and and come up with clever route options that take into account distance, posted speed limits, real-time traffic flow, and the kinds of trips you typically make. This will be the new modus operandi for all systems in this class, and you have to imagine that a day is coming when widespread penetration of these systems could radically redistribute traffic flow in our metro areas. The Z1 arrives in spring 2006.

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