The device will work for all sorts of smartphones and 7 to 10-inch tablets. The cradle can rotate 360 degrees, which will allow you to use your gadgets in portrait or landscape mode. Its hinges also move 180 degrees to give you lots of additional flexibility.

On the plus side, it will get your smartphone out of your hands, which is a good thing when you’re driving.  On the other hand, it means you might start using your Kindle, Nook, iPad, Playbook or Galaxy Tab to play games or watch movies while driving, which would probably be even more distracting than making a phone call or texting.

If you can resist using this thing for evil, or can insist that its for passenger use only, the Satechi SCH-121 sells for $29.99(USD) over at their website.

[via Ubergizmo]

Google has announced that it has updated the service to version 6.2, and with that update the photos loose their gaps and irregularities, and get a uniform appearance.

That means now when you view the Earth, instead of seeing a mosaic of square photos plastered next to each other you just get a very smooth and cohesive image.

The tech used to accomplish this evens out the pics so ones taken night aren’t so dark and ones with clouds don’t stand out. Google also added the ability to get better search results, as well as added walking, public transport, and biking directions and the ability to share maps via Google+.

You can grab the latest Google Earth installer here.

[via Google Lat Long Blog]

The idea is that the windows would be transparent screens which could display all sorts of content from game apps for kids to navigation details for the driver or passenger. I really like the idea of navigation content being projected onto the windshield. That way you don’t need to take your eyes off the road for directions.

The apps for kids though are the ones that will likely get the most attention. The prototype apps let kids finger paint, and interact with characters who react to the speed of the vehicle. For the big kids, there are apps for navigation as well as streaming music and social networking.

GM notes that it has no current plans to use the window tech in a production vehicle, and there is no indication when this tech will leave concept and come to the real world. Hopefully it’s not that far off.

You can either retrace your steps, walk around the entire parking lot or basement parking area until you find your car, or just randomly hit the unlock and lock button on your car key so you can be guided by the sound of your car being locked and unlocked as you inch closer.

Or you could just wait until AHHAPROJECT’S Car Compass concept becomes a reality. While there are already some apps on the market to help you find your car, the Car Compass is envisioned as a simple enhancement to your car’s key fob.

It works just like a regular compass, but instead of gauging what direction you’re headed, it will point you in the right direction towards your car. You can literally say goodbye to walking around aimlessly in the parking lot (or thinking that someone stole your car!) once you’ve got this thing in your hands.

[via Yanko Design]

The screenshot above is from the shakey-cam video below, which was uploaded by co-Redditor animatedintro, who tried out the module and (seemingly) lived to tell the tale.

Fire up a portal to Reddit or Megaupload to download the unofficial file. It’s been confirmed to work with Nuvi 40, 200, 200W, 250, 250W, 350, Garmin Mobile XT and StreetPilot c550 units. TomTom users can also endanger their lives with a similar mod.

[via Reddit]

But did you know that with just your iPhone, you can travel the world for free? With Wander, you can virtually visit countless locations all over the world through the magic of pictures.

Wander will have you fill out your profile first. Then you choose where you want to “go,” and the app will hook you up with another user from that country.

For a week, you can correspond through instant messages and photos, and get a glimpse into the world of someone who lives in your destination country.

And when your week-long virtual tour is over, you can start over again at another destination. Pretty neat for something that’s available for free. It’s currently available over on the iTunes App Store, and is coming to Android soon.

[via Peta Pixel]

She updated that app roughly 125,643 times over the course of the day. I can only imagine that with all the kids in the country with OnStar service in family vehicles calling to check on Santa that many times each and it will be a very long night for those folks at OnStar.

The OnStar tracking will start at 7am on Christmas Eve and will be available until 5am Christmas Day. “We see this holiday tradition as staying true to keeping subscribers connected in ways they never thought possible,” said Terry Inch, OnStar vice president, Sales, Marketing and Business Development. “We know many of our customers will be glad to know Santa’s location information is just one blue button press away.”

If you have the issue of losing your car a lot, hit Kickstarter and check out the new Find My Car Smart app and hardware combo. Together, they will tell you where you parked, how far you are away, and how long the car was there. While there are already apps which remind you where you parked, you don’t have to remember to activate this one. The dongle works its magic by detecting when you power down the car and automatically tells your iPhone to make a notation using its GPS sensor. The Smart dongle for your car communicates with your iPhone 4S using the new low-power Bluetooth 4.0 standard. According to its maker, this is the first app to use Bluetooth 4.0.

The app is on the iTunes App Store already, but the hardware part isn’t shipping quite yet. A pledge of $25 will get you the dongle and the app, while a pledge of $30 or more you get the app, dongle, and a car USB charger to keep it powered up, in case your car doesn’t already have a USB port. Find My Car Smart expects to start shipping the first of the devices in late January 2012.

Mitsubishi’s goal for the EMIRAI was to offer an intuitive dashboard and user interface, which they hope to introduce in their vehicles within the next ten years. That’s a bold statement, but it does seem possible. Some newer cars have already started to introduce funky new high-tech dashboards.

Instead of having a flat LCD panel, Mitsubishi’s design uses a curved rear-projected display, with capacitive touch sensors. The steering wheel/joystick has got 18 buttons on two keypads, and a unique shape-shifting capability which can retract buttons which are not contextually relevant. It’s also packed with sensors, including personal health monitoring, and probably will be able to update your Facebook and Twitter timeline while you drive.

If that’s not enough, the passengers in the rear seat of the car get to watch glasses-free 3D high-def video while they go for a ride.

[via DigInfo.TV via designboom]

According to the scientist, the RQ-170 Sentinel drone was forced to land where the Iranians wanted it to using a GPS hack. First, they blocked the GPS signals to the drone placing it into autopilot. Then the GPS hack fooled the drone into thinking it was somewhere it wasn’t.

The drone then landed of its own accord when the Iranians told it to and they had the complete and working drone in their possession. The crazy part is that apparently the military knew that this exact hack could compromise the drone all the way back in 2003.

[via C|Net via Gizmodo]

This Bluetooth Rearview Mirror Kit is available from Chinavasion for around $200 (USD). It seems like a pretty hefty price to pay for a rearview mirror, but that’s because (and I’m just stating the obvious here) it’s not just an ordinary rearview mirror.

In fact, it’s a touchscreen GPS, DVR, wireless camera, media and game player rolled into one pretty package.

Aside from that, it’s also a hands-free speakerphone and a wireless rearview parking camera to help you ease into those hard-to-park areas.

So really, what more can you ask for in a rearview mirror? With this baby, you can navigate through tight roads, listen to your favorite tunes, catch a quick flick in traffic, play a few games when you’re bored, and even use it to speak to the 911 operator when you’ve driven yourself into a ditch by the road because of previously-mentioned activities.

[via Gizmag via Dvice]

The coolest part though, is that if a shopper walks into the store to pick up a purchase that they made using the downloadable Apple Store App’s Personal Pickup feature, the staff is alerted when they arrive in the store for pick up without the shopper having to do anything. It even tells them the location of the customer. The goal is that the person walks in, and a store employee walks up to them with their stuff.

That actually sounds pretty darn cool. It would be great to walk into a crowded Apple Store and have them bring you your stuff rather than having to wait in line or find someone free on the floor. Are apps like this cool in your mind or too “big brother?”

[via NYT]

Images are captured by the iPhone and automatically uploaded to Mark’s iOS5-enabled PhotoStream. As the vehicle drives and captures images, GPS coordinates are recorded using a Dexter Industries dGPS sensor. This creates a KML file, which is then sent to a PC when the car is in Wi-Fi range. When the file is opened in Google Earth, it shows the path that the car drove, including placemarks for every picture that was taken along the way.

Mark uses an app called SoundSnap which triggers the camera whenever the NXT plays a loud sound from its speaker. Eventually, Mark hopes to eliminate this analog step and go with a direct Bluetooth trigger.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I wonder what else Mark’s next version of his LEGO Streetview Car will do. It will probably be even more automated, since there are still a few manual steps involved in generating the Google Earth map.

[via Make:]

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think having one of those emergency distress buttons would be pretty cool. Not for your home or office or car (although it would be pretty cool to have a button at each of these locations), but for yourself. And that’s essentially what you’ll get with MyRingGuard.

Currently in the prototype stages, MyRingGuard is a ring that’s molded from silicone and plastic that, when triggered, sends off a signal to your smartphone via Bluetooth to fire off a pre-programmed text message to a set group of people, along with your exact location via GPS.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

MyRingGuard is up for funding at Indie Gogo with a target goal of $30,000. Assuming the project is funded, a $39 pledge will get you a MyRingGuard personal emergency button for yourself. Now there’s another way of putting a ring on it.

[via Oh Gizmo!]

Well, it has a 600MHz processor and weighs just 35 grams for one thing. MOTOACTV combines a GPS-enabled touchscreen watch with a smart music player. Those looking for a watch to workout to should like the fact that it learns songs that will make you exercise harder and it plays those songs more often. (This is where the ACTV part comes into play. Get it?)

There’s also a built-in heart rate monitor and it will give you performance stats like duration, distance, avg. pace, calories burned, and avg. heart rate through a Bluetooth headset. It also has an FM radio built in, and will peer with your smartphone to allow your to answer calls or read texts from the watch display.

It will track your running, walking and cycling stats outside, and treadmill and step machine stats indoors. If you like, you can access your stats via a web browser as well at motoactv.com. So yeah, basically this is a smart-Nano for fitness geeks. MOTOACTV will be available on November 6th, with an 8GB version costing $249.99 (USD) and a 16GB model for $299.99.

[via TechCrunch]

And then there’s the Find My Friends app. It’s great for people to catch up with their friends and acquaintances who are on the go. It’s also an app that some distraught husbands (or wives) can use to track down where their spouse is.

And that’s exactly what this guy used to find out if his wife was cheating on him or not–and it turns out that she was. Well, sort of. The following post was put up by Thomas Metz on the MacRumors forums earlier this week:

I got my wife a new 4s and loaded up find my friends without her knowing. She told me she was at her friends house in the east village. I’ve had suspicions about her meeting this guy who live uptown. Lo and behold, Find my Friends has her right there.

I just texted her asking where she was and the dumb b!otch said she was on 10th Street!! Thank you Apple, thank you App Store, thank you all. These beautiful treasure trove of screen shots going to play well when I meet her a$$ at the lawyer’s office in a few weeks.

thankfully, she’s the rich one.

I think Tom here definitely caught his wife (maybe soon-to-be ex-wife) in a huge lie here, but he’s going to have to put more than just some app screenshots on the table to prove that she was committing adultery. I doubt this is the first time someone was caught lying (or cheating, if that’s the case) because of an app, though. Others probably didn’t post their findings on the Internet like Metz did, though.

[via Gizmodo via Dvice]

The special edition has the voice of Jeremy Clarkson and a bunch of other Top Gear features. The GPS has speed camera warnings, weather reports, and other things. It features HD traffic updated every two minutes so you can stay out of traffic on and on the hoon. The GPS unit also has the Top Gear POI database with lists of racetracks and more and it has special startup and shutdown screens. Here’s a brief sample of Clarkson’s cheeky GPS voice work for your enjoyment:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

One of my favorite things about the Top Gear GPS special is that it has Stig mode where it broods silently. It also has Top Gear car icons rather than some generic car. If you like the idea of this GPS, you can pick one up in the UK right now for £189.00 (~$295 USD)

Scary thought, I know, which is why I think the City Scars app is a very good idea, even though that’s all it is right now: an idea.

The app has a pretty scary (and strange name) but in a way, it does make sense. It tracks down the scars of the city you’re in (scars being crimes, broken street lights, among others) from user-submitted information and pushes alerts and notifications to other users of the app.

Through the app, concerned users can also share “digital witness” information to the authorities about stuff that they just happened to capture and, well, witness.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via Yanko Design]

The model itself is offers up some intriguing possibilities, that someone will probably jump on before long. This could lead to people putting QR codes on top of their buildings or carving QR crop circles (squares?) that could be read using Google Earth, providing additional details for locations you scan from above.

The idea would be perfect to let alien invaders know what’s really up on planet Earth, if they ever come knocking at our front door. Also, it also could provide much needed entertainment for the handful of astronauts floating around in space.

[via Make:]

Scheduled to debut at this September’s Frankfurt Auto Show, the Ford EVOS is one hot ride, what with it’s GT-inspired lines and high-end touches like gullwing doors. But for us tech geeks, what’s under the hood (and inside it’s wire harnesses) matters just as much. Running on hybrid power, the EVOS is designed to not only be a performance ride, but to provide tons of features which take advantage of today’s connected world, going way beyond hands-free dialing and GPS navigation.

For instance, the EVOS could use environmental data to route you on the “healthiest” path, finding the cleanest air en route. Or, if you want to go for a zippy ride through the open road, the it could automatically adjust the cars suspension, braking and engine into performance mode, based on environment, weather, location, and your historical driving skills. Oh yeah, the music would switch from adult contemporary to aggressive rock to go with your hooning.

In addition to its driving-oriented technology, EVOS could even communicate with your home’s automation system, kicking it into energy-saving mode when you leave the house, then turning things back on when you pull into the driveway. The car can even provide seamless streaming audio from your car into your house when you enter.

Check out Ford’s overview of the EVOS technology concept:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Could she say “The CLOUD” one more time? It’s all pretty futuristic stuff, and Ford says this specific car will never be produced as shown – but every feature is firmly grounded in technologies available today, which is exactly what you want to see in a concept car, right?

[via Inside Line]