Find My iPhone is live, totally found our iPhone

We wouldn't really say we "have it together" when it comes to remembering where we put our keys / phone / small children, so Apple's announcement of the Find My iPhone service for MobileMe users came as quite a relief. The service just went live, and with a quick toggle of a preference pane in iPhone OS 3.0 the phone is fully prepared for all sorts of lost and found scenarios -- along with acting as an incredibly intuitive (if pricey) stalking mechanism. Find My iPhone works exactly as advertised, giving us a fairly good location estimate from within our lead-lined underground fortress, and sending annoying messages to the phone complete with sound, even when the handset is switched to silent, though unfortunately the sound is a sort of sonar ping that strikes us as incredibly difficult to locate, unless of course our phone is taken by whale. The only other problem is that both the location function and the message service took a couple minutes to track down our iPhone -- not a deal breaker, but we don't know what the hangup could be. After the device is pinged, a confirmation of the event was sent to our MobileMe email address. A live, enthralling video demonstration is after the break.

[via engadget]

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Magellan intros 4.7-inch RoadMate 1475T PND for $299

Magellan's been on somewhat of a hiatus since being taken away by MiTAC, and while an unassuming FCC find has shown that it's still alive and well, we're thrilled to see the company's second actual product announcement in over half a year. The RoadMate 1475T is, for all intents and purposes, a refreshed RoadMate 1470 with a traffic receiver, though said traffic receiver works without any monthly fees. It features a 4.7-inch WQVGA anti-glare display, AAA TourBook listings, six million POIs, spoken street name guidance, highway lane assist, QuickSpell and NAVTEQ maps of the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. Not too shabby for just $299, wouldn't you say?

[via engadget]

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iriver's M7 NV Classic navigates the road and your media

Mmm mm m, iriver, you sure know a thing or two about industrial design. Meet the M7 or NV Classic if you prefer, an update to the original iRiver NV only without the massive jogwheel wart. As a navigator, this 181 x 120 x 21.5 device features SiRF GRF3i+ GPS, an SDHC slot for maps, a pair of 1.5-watt speakers for turn-by-turn audio, and a biggie 7-inch 800x480 touchscreen TFT LCD to show you the way. As a media device we're looking at DMB digital television, support for MPEG1, MPEG4, WMV9, and XVID video, MP3, WMA, OGG, and WAV audio, JPEG and BMP images, and a bundled 4GB SDHC card for storage. Priced for Korea at KRW329,000 which would be right around $248 if it ever came to the US, which it won't, at least not in this configuration.

[via engadget]

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AutoLinQ initiative taps Android for new connected car initiative

This is a bit of a wild one: some very disparate companies are (apparently) teaming up to conquer the car, Microsoft Sync style. Details are a bit slim at the moment, but Continental Auto Group has announced plans to build what they're calling "the connected car." The new hardware and software system "leverages" the Android Marketplace, and encompasses car-friendly APIs, car-specific in-vehicle apps and a touchscreen interface plugged into a system designed to pull data from the web and control internal car systems. On a sketchier front, Phandroid has done some mucking around, and seems to think Google, BMW, T-Mobile, Wind River and SVOX are all on the short list for involvement. It's hard to say exactly how likely that might be, but we're happy to dream electric dreams of an OHA-style Sync killer along with them. Another shot is after the break.

[via engadget]

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Sony building Android-based Walkman and PND for 2010 launch?

We'll admit it, we expected to be knee-deep in Android gear by now. However, it seems like the consumer electronics industry wanted to build more mature products around versions 1.5 and 2.0 of Google's open source OS instead. Regardless, we're in the thick of it now having just witnessed a deluge of Android-based smartbooks / netbooks (expected before October) at Computex and Google's own announcement that at least 18 new Android handsets will launch this year. Building upon Sony Ericsson's plan to launch its first handset based on Android 2.0, we're now hearing that Android will play a prominent role across Sony's portable devices starting with an Android-based Walkman and personal navigation device (PND) launching sometime in 2010. Engadget Japanese says that Sony's affection for Android is an "open secret" in Japan. In fact, an analyst speaking to Japan's Nikkan simply states the development of an Android Walkman and PND as fact. Not that we're too surprised by this; as demonstrated by its XMB interface now extended to a variety of devices other than the PS3, Sony is clearly trying to unify the user experience across its consumer electronics portfolio. And opting for open-source software across the board should keep costs low while increasing speed to market. Oh Android, is there anything you can't do...in Google fanboy theory?
[via engadget]

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