SAN FRANCISCO -- The O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference is all about the socialization of the Internet and building communities. The concept is best understood as two-way conversations between content producers, or user generated content and their readers and commenters. But what if these socialization efforts could be automated and crowd-sourced?

That's the goal behind the Dash Internet-Connected Two-Way GPS receiver, announced two years ago, and recently available for $399 with service plans ranging from $9.99 to $12.99 per month.

Rob Curry, the president and CEO of Dash, spoke for at the conference about the device's connected information feeds. The unit has three radios - GPS for input data, and cellular and Wi-Fi for two-way data exchange. The intelligent software inside will take your position via GPS, match it to the road being traveled, then upload the speed information into its service, called TruTraffic.

Portable media player manufacturer Archos made a slew of announcements today: Altogether the company is making it easier than ever to capture, carry, and consume your digital music and video.

TVportation: Available next month for the Archos TV+ WiFi Digital Video Recorder as a plug-in ($49.99 or free if the ARCHOS TV+ is registered with Archos), the feature lets users watch live TV on the device wherever they take it.

ARCHOS Web TV and Radio plug-in: Adds support for Adobe® Flash® 9, Windows Media Video® (WMV) 9 and ON2 video formats to the Archos 605 or 705 WiFi devices. It'll be be available next month for $19.99.

GPS In-Car Holder for the Archos 605 WiFi portable media player (PMP). Just pop your 604 WiFi into the holder to turn it into a GPS nav system complete with mapping and voice directions. The accessory will provide "complete navigation support with Tele Atlas maps, available for the European version covering 22 countries, the North America version covering the U.S. and Canada, and a Chinese version." Look for this in May. Sold separately, $199.99; bundled with a 30GB player, $399.99.

Paramount Digital Entertainment partnership: Lots more movies in Archos's online store, and it says many will also come preloaded on future players.

For more details, check out the individual press releases at Archos's site. Also look for analysis from PC Magazine's Tim Gideon on PCMag.com.

Everyone remembers the terrible stories on the news a few years ago, of climbers and hikers lost in the wilderness and the desperate search to find them before the unthinkable happened. If you love the outdoors, a situation like that could be your worst nightmare.

A number of products have appeared to help you survive the elements should you wind up in a bad position. The SPOT Satellite Messenger is one of those products, and while I didn't take it to the top of a mountain, it certainly proved itself useful on more than one occasion.

GPS maker Garmin unexpectedly announced the nuviphone late on Wednesday, which combines a cell phone with GPS technology -- or, in Garmin's case, vice versa.

As of now, the nuviphone is a phone in search of a carrier. No partnerships were announced, and the company has yet to officially announce the 3.5G technology that's used inside of it, although Engadget reports that the quad-band phone actually uses HSDPA. Users should expect it in the third quarter of 2008 at an undisclosed price.

The phone mimics the Apple iPhone in that it has a touchscreen interface that takes up the majority (but not all) of the phone's surface area. The phone contains a camera of unspecified quality. But as one might expect from a manufacturer like Garmin, the centerpiece of the phone is the true GPS functionality.

And GPS is the keystone technology. If the phone is inserted into its docking cradle, the nuviphone instantly turns on hands-free call capabilities, according to Garmin. Pictures taken with the onboard camera can be instantly geotagged with a specific latitude and longitude.

Mio Technology isn't introducing any new navigation devices this year at CES 2008, but it's showing a technology demonstration of new devices that the company will introduce in the second quarter. The new GPS line, called Mio Move, will feature both 3.5- and 4.3-inch screen models. Unlike the existing C series of GPSs, the Mio Move line will be targeted at value-conscious consumers who are interested only in automotive navigation. Mio Move products will lack the media players found on the C series, as well as bicycle and pedestrian modes. Most important--the Mio Move GPSs will be based on new system software developed in-house. We expect to see features similar to those found on Navman GPSs, as Mio's parent purchased the automotive division from Navman last year. Stay to tuned PCMag.com for full reviews as soon as they are available.

Welcome to beautiful Las Vegas. A five and a half hour flight, and we hit the ground running, in full great white shark mode--slow down and we'll all surely die, or, at the very least, miss the ever-important 2008 buzz product and invoke the negative side of the omnipresent gadget blog karma.

Our first few hours were devoted to getting our bearings and sorting out the game plan, before heading over to the Venetian at the other end of the Vegas strip for the show preview with the appropriately over-the-top name, CES Unveiled. And, like every other aspect of the trip thus far, we were greeted with a long, winding line out the door that ended mere moments before we began seriously considering giving up and taking the long, shameful monorail ride back to our hotel room.

The first of a series of consecutive pre-show warm-ups, Unveiled showcased a small meeting hall full of award-winning products that are set to be displayed at the convention. This being my first CES, the whole thing struck me as being a bit odd, representatives at each of the booths inviting us to check out another booth featuring the same products a few days later--sort of a "Hey, if you like my iPod dock in this room, just wait until you see it under the buzzing florescent lights of the convention center."

In the end, I suppose these events are useful, after all. Expecting anyone to check out every product in the context of the actual event is the stuff of demagogic Greek mythology, so, without further ado, I present to you some of the highlights of the pre-show spectacular.

This is when technology can seriously go wrong. According to an MSNBC report, a computer consultant on Wednesday rented a car equipped with a GPS system. It advised the man to turn right. When he did so, he ended up on train tracks with a train headed right toward him!

Fortunately, he escaped from the vehicle just in the nick of time, but the train, unable to stop, slammed into the car at 60 mph, Metro-North railroad spokesman Dan Brucker said Thursday. Consequently, the car was pushed more than 100 feet and approximately 500 passengers onboard were stranded for more than 2 hours while the damage was cleaned up. It's reported that 250 feet of the track has been heavily damaged.

Today only, Walmart.com is selling the Garmin nüvi 200 GPS system for just $178, regularly $320. The nüvi 200 features a 3.5-inch color TFT touchscreen, turn-by-turn directions with voice guidance, preloaded maps for the U.S. and Puerto Rico, world clock, currency/measurement converters, SD memory card slot, 2D and 3D mapping, and a battery life of up to 5 hours. Get it now while it's in stock!

Happy Cyber Monday, online's answer to Black Friday. The web is just crawling with sales today--check out our Cyber Monday roundup on PCMag.com for proof. Telenav has jumped on the bandwagon with a deal of $99 for an entire year of GPS Navigator service.

Telenav GPS Navigator (with Telenav Traffic) offers turn-by-turn directions, location-based services and re-routing around traffic jams. Normally it goes for up to $10/month, so you're getting about 2 months free.

From our review: "I tested TeleNav on a number of routes, both driven and simulated, to see how well it worked. I'll admit that I really liked the traffic function. To be able to preview bottlenecks along your route is a nice feature, but to see just how slow the traffic is and how much of a delay you're likely to experience is priceless. For my test routes around New Jersey and into Manhattan, the traffic-optimized routes worked well. Route recalculation times after a missed turn were similar to those of a dedicated GPS device." Read our full review of the Telenav GPS Navigator (with Telenav Traffic). Get the $99 Telenav deal here.

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, today Pharos Science and Applications, Inc. announced two new additions to its line of Drive GPS. The Drive GPS 250, with an MSRP price of $299.95 features a 4.3-inch touch screen, Navteq maps for the US and Canada preloaded onto a 1GB SD card, and 1.3 million Points of interest. The Drive GPS 150 is a smaller version with the same features and a 3.5-inch screen, and will be priced at $199.95. Both units have 20-channel SiRF Star III GPS receivers and support text-to-speech.

Both units are expected to be available at major retail outlets in the coming weeks. We'll have a hands-on review over on PCMag.com in the near future.

Post by Craig Ellison

Mio's newest GPS device, the DigiWalker C320, launched today at 4,500 Radio Shack stores nationwide. The C320, available exclusively at Radio Shack, features a 4.3-inch (dia.) touch screen, pre-loaded maps of the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) on the built-in 1GB of memory, and a 1.7 million Point of Interest database.

With an estimated retail price of $299.95, the DigiWalker C320 is Mio's least expensive 4.3-inch widescreen automotive GPS. It shares many of the features of its more expensive sibling, the $399.95 Digiwalker C520, but the C320 is not upgradeable to live traffic and lacks the C520's text-to-speech capabilities.

by Craig Ellison

Clarion, maker of car audio speaker systems, mobile audio/video components, CD changers, amplifiers, alarms, and SD/ CD/ cassette receivers, recently unveiled a compact navigation device specifically for Japanese motorcyclists: the DrivTrax P-5 (DTR-P5). This unique personal navigation device (PND) combines the features of precision guidance technology with an intuitive user interface, along with a highly comprehensive nav database, which includes 11 million searchable addresses, 8 million phone numbers, 487 peripheral information retrieval categories, 39,462 intersection lane and route signboard locations. And an optional casing (the BKA-002) will safeguard the device during a downpour.

Yukyung Technologies Co., Ltd, a leading Korean manufacturer of networking equipment, recently unveiled a unique Multimedia DMB Navigator.

With an in built GPS antenna and SiRF3 chipset, the viliv X2 FLASH renders navigation services to travelers even when they are not on wheels. The device utilizes flash memory, rather than the conventional hard disk drive of its predecessor, the P2. The device is powered by NAND flash memory ranging from 4- to 8GB. It also supports SDHC cards, extending the memory capacity to 16GB.

The device also boasts a 4.3-inch LCD touchscreen from Samsung, with a 500cd/m2 brightness, a 400:1 contrast ratio, and wide viewing angles. The X2 navigator is bundled with Windows CE, along with a robust 500Mhz AMD AU1200 processor, allowing the user to view DMB TV and videos in multiple formats, such as, DivX, XviD, MPGE1/2/4, WMV 7 or 8 (480 × 272), and WMV 9 (720 × 480). The X2 also features an audio player that supports MP3, WMA, OGG, and WAV, as well as an image viewer, which displays JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, and WMF files.

The X2 measures approximately 142 x 79 x 23 mm and weighs only 290 grams. The device has been priced at 459,000 Korean Won ($497 USD) for 4GB model and 529,000 Korean Won ($572 USD) for 8 GB mode. While it looks a lot like the P2, in terms of design, the X2 offers several new features like karaoke, a car diary, and TPEG service, T-DMB, and multitasking function. The X2 also manages to squeeze in support for Flash, HTML and MS Office documents.

Post by Rahul Prabhakar

Heading on your summer vacation soon? If you're like us—and you probably are since you're reading this—you can't go far without your gadgets. In honor of that, we've pulled together our reviews of the most rugged and portable devices--perfect for hiking, camping or a day at the beach. Check out Rugged Devices for the Road on PCMag.com.

Delphi's latest portable GPS device, the Nav300, has the usual satellite navigation abilities, and also packs in ZAGAT ratings, voice command control, Bluetooth connectivity, Text-To-Speech for street names, speed limit warnings, and a host of other features.

Lane assistance and road sign alerts will show upcoming road signs and make sure drivers are in the correct lane to make a turn. The Points of Interest feature includes branded icons, making finding fast food at a glance all the more easy. When not on the road, the Nav300 doubles as a media player, handling music and movies via an SD card, and the device also includes a built-in "matching game." There's optional real-time traffic and weather information available through Clear Channel for an additional $100 fee for lifetime service, if purchased with the device. The opt-in-later option costs $199.

The NAVTEQ Map software includes not only the continental United States, but Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. The Delphi Nav300 is available now at ShopDelphi.com for a base price of $399, or $499 including the lifetime Clear Channel traffic and weather alerts. ZAGAT ratings access should be available in September.

Post by Matt Safford