Garmin announces StreetPilot navigation for iPhone

Garmin has so far kept its navigation package exclusive to its standalone GPS units and smartphones, but that's about to change. Garmin's StreetPilot iPhone navigation has already hit the AppStore.
Garmin has finally given up on the exclusivity and released its navigation package for the iPhone. The StreetPilot app offers everything you can get with the Garmin's standalone navigation devices - turn-by-turn voice navigation, real-time traffic updates, millions of POIs, address book, weather and forecast, speed limits warnings, etc.

SpeedPilot for iPhone
The SpeedPilot app can also access your music and play it during navigation. Multi-tasking is also supported - the app will continue to work in background and navigate you.
StreetPilot for iPhone is currently available only for USA and Canada and costs $40 in the AppStore.
Garmin has also announced a new tracking device - the GTU 10 - which can help you track any objects or people it's attached to. It works in conjunction with the Garmin Tracker app, which will be available soon in the Apple's AppStore and Android Market.
Another Garmin app that's about to hit the Android market is myMechanic. It uses Bluetooth to connect to the Garmin ecoRoute HD module (sold separately for about $100) and let's you know your car's specific performance metrics including horsepower, torque and G-force.
The final Garmin announcement for this year's CES is the My-Cast Lite Android app. It's free and provides radar images, current conditions, hourly and extended weather forecasts.

Read rest of entry

We get more pics of Vodafone 360 H2, Vodafone says it's canceled

We just got some more photos of the LiMo OS powered Vodafone 360 H2 phone along with some confirmation of a few of the rumored specs. In the same time a Vodafone rep contacted us saying that the Vodafone H2 has been canceled since July 2010.
The successor to the Vodafone 360 H1 has been around in the rumor mill for a while now, but following the new leaked images from Sunday, Vodafone came up and confirmed that there will be no new Vodafone 360 handsets and that development of the H2 has been ceased since last summer.
We acknowledge these new bits of info and we hope Samsung will put the hardware to some nice use in another handset (Bada OS, maybe). We can't help but publish the new shots of this dead-end prototype as a wave goodbye.
So here it is compared to the iPhone 4 and a BlackBerry.

Vodafone 360 H2 spy shots
We guess this is the end of LiMo handsets altogether although that mobile OS was a hacker's dream. The small and dedicated community has already ported to it Android 2.2 Froyo, MeeGo and even Debian (a Linux distribution, many other distros are based on it).

Read rest of entry

Freescale hits with dual-core and quad-core mobile CPUs

Smartphone and tablet processors are just about entering the dual-core stages of their evolution and Freescale wants to join the party. Not only this, the company is even willing to throw a quad-core CPU our way just for the fun of it.
Freescale just announced a trio of new mobile processors, suitable for use in Smartphones, Tablets and eReaders. The three versions of the i.MX 6 CPU are called Solo, Dual and Quad and come with one, two and four Cortex A9 cores respectively. Each of the cores can be clocked at up to 1.2 GHz. The level 2 cache isn't quoted for each of the CPUs but Freescale says it reaches 1 MB (presumably on the quad-core unit).

Still each and every of the i.MX 6 processors is said to allow full HD (as in 1080p) video decoding and encoding. There's also support for HDMI v1.4 and multiple USB 2.0 ports. The stereoscopic image sensor support allows for 3D imaging, provided that someone builds the right camera module for the task.
Freescale plans to start sampling the new CPUs later this year, which isn't nearly as specific as we hoped to get. Anyway we don't expect to be seeing one of those babies on an actual tablet or smartphone before the next holiday season.

Read rest of entry