Cars.com’s David Thomas speculates that the iPad could prove to be a serious problem for automakers that charge a ransom for rear entertainment systems.

The base iPad, Thomas notes, costs far less than most DVD options offered by automakers. Ford charges $1,995 for a dual-headrest-mounted DVD system in its Flex crossover. In the Acura MDX, its single-screen system, with three wireless headsets and a 9-inch screen, costs $1,900. At $500 a pop, giving two kids their own iPads would cost far less than what the automakers charge for an ICE system.

The Cars.com article mentions some of the advantages of ICE, including being weather-tested to work from -5 to 160 degrees F (-20 to 71 C), and being far less prone to breakage.

Alternatively, if you’re planning a long and unconfortable flight, discover how your iPad can Make Air Travel Considerably Less Terrible.

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Source: Slashdot

Cars.com's David Thomas speculates that [0]the iPad could
prove to be a serious problem for automakers that charge a ransom for
rear entertainment systems. The base iPad, Thomas notes, costs far less
than most DVD options offered by automakers. Ford charges $1,995 for a
[1]dual-headrest-mounted DVD system in its Flex crossover. In the Acura
MDX, its [2] single-screen system, with three wireless headsets and a
9-inch screen, costs $1,900. At $500 a pop, giving two kids their own
iPads would cost far less than what the automakers charge for an ICE
system. The Cars.com article mentions some of the advantages of ICE,
including being weather-tested to work from -5 to 160 degrees F (-20 to
71 C), and being far less prone to breakage.

Magical in its simplicity.

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source: The Form Group

Revealed at The Gadget Show in Birmingham this week, the system connects over a 3G network, letting users create their own local wireless connection in the same way as 3′s MiFi device – indeed, it’s essentially a re-packaged version of that device with a car kit.

While drivers will hopefully steer away from using the web at the wheel, 3 predicts the mobile hotspot will let passengers entertain themselves with their iPods, netbooks or gaming consoles, as well as give access to traffic updates, email and music on the go.

David Kerrigan, head of internet services at 3, claimed a quarter of those surveyed by the company wanted internet-enabled cars, especially families and mobile workers.

“Mobile workers can check traffic information and email on route to a meeting and kids can social network or download tracks to an iPod Touch while on a road trip,” he said in a statement.

For £59.99 ($90), the In Car Wi-Fi kit comes with a Huawei MiFi modem, mains and in-car charger, and windscreen holder, as well as 1GB of data for a month. Buying a MiFi device from the company on a pay-as-you-go basis costs £69.9 ($110).

The price of “freedom”.

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Source: IT Pro

Most of the time, we don’t really need to own THE newest and coolest gadget that has been released to feel happy and complete; just convincing ourselves that we don’t actually need it is often well enough to make us feel satisfied anyway.

So if after reading this review you still think “what is the purpose of this?”, then there’s probably no reason for you to get an iPad.

Smile, you just saved $500 (sorry, $499)

When I’m working from home, I have a dual-monitor setup for my PC. Very useful on busy days or for keeping an eye on RSS feeds while watching a movie. The truth is, it makes me feel like being some kind of a successful trader who monitors the financial markets… “buy, buy” or “Oh my God! Sell, sell!!”. Really??!
No. But some fellows do that, I’m almost sure.

On the road I take my MSI Wind netbook, and while multiple desktops are handy, I sometimes wish I had a second screen for that thing, too – all the more so as netbooks have such a tiny screen that you get your eyes burnt after 30 minutes of browsing the Internet. Yeah, it’d though be pretty weird to set up a 13-inch LED-backlit secondary screen at a coffee shop but anything to get the job done, right? Right.

Made by MEDL Technologies, it’s called simply “The Panel” and it’s exactly what it says it is: a secondary screen that uses USB as its display link. There are smaller solutions, of course, but this is the biggest standalone monitor I’ve seen that just runs off USB. It’s also battery-powered, and will run for five hours, which… is good, I guess, but it isn’t clear whether it’s charged by the USB or not. If not… why not?

It weighs just over 2 pounds, and at a 1280×800 resolution, it’s just big enough for HD stuff. One really handy use I can think of is if you have kids, you just hook this sucker up, put a few cartoons into a playlist, and put the screen facing away from you so the kids can watch while you work. Handy for airports and vacations.

Unfortunately it’s not a touchscreen. That would have been a really nice feature, but I guess we’ll have to wait for “The Touch Panel.”

I guess we all somehow experience the same feelings when we move for good to a new place we don’t know, a place we don’t speak the language and are not familiar yet with the culture.  A place we feel like a foreigner, though we now leave there. In her post Alison explains how to turn this, at first challenging, change into a wonderful adventure.

I’d like to dedicate this post to my friend Tanya, a wonderful Mexican expat who lives in Paris and meets with the same issues as Alison did when she started her new life in Brussels.

Hold on and keep faith amiga!

When I started blogging, I wasn’t trying to make money on-line or become famous. In fact, I never expected anyone other than my friends and family would read it. But now, I’m pretty sure that blogging saved my expat life.

I moved to Belgium five years ago as a trailing spouse. My husband and I decided together that we wanted to try living in Europe. The opportunity came up sooner than we expected, when his company offered to move us to Brussels. Legalities being what they are in Belgium, I was unable to get a work-permit as the trailing spouse, so my days were filled with getting our new life settled.

Back then, blogging wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, and I didn’t know much about it, but I got tired of writing the same things and answering the same questions in a dozen e-mails. I had learned basic web design and HTML in school so I decided to start a website to share stories and photos with my friends and family back home.

My blog posts were basically extended letters. I didn’t think much about grammar or structure. My posts didn’t have a topic other than what I had been up to since the last time I wrote. I never expected anyone that didn’t know me would bother much with my blog.

In those first few months, I wrote only about happy things – new places we travelled to, new discoveries we made, etc.

The shiny newness of expat life wore off pretty quickly though. The reality was I was mired in mountains of Belgian bureaucracy and red-tape. We had no support from my husband’s company; we didn’t speak the language; we knew no one and we lived in a small community with limited public transportation. I spent most of my days feeling isolated and depressed and wondering what the hell I had done.

I didn’t want to burden my family and friends with my woes. Honestly, I felt like a failure for being depressed in the first place. I mean, I was living in Europe after all. Something that is a dream for most people was my reality. Except most days it felt more like a nightmare.

I turned to the blogosphere for help. Although there weren’t many expat blogs based in Belgium at that time, I found some blogs written by expat women in other countries who were writing about the exact feelings I was having. Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone and it gave me the courage to write about what I was really experiencing.

It was scary to put my stress, struggles and depression out there, but instead of scorn for my whining, I started to get email and comments from other women in my situation. Some were already in Belgium, some were planning an expat move and all of them had similar fears and worries as me.

I was contacted by an expat news website in Belgium and asked to do a weekly column about my experiences in Belgium. Through that column, even more trailing spouses contacted me and encouraged me to keep writing and sharing.

It didn’t happen overnight, but gradually things got better. Because of my blog, I met people, I had an outlet for my stress and worry and I had a sense of purpose. Blogging and the support of my readers gave me the courage to pursue my career as a photographer.

Five years later, my blog and my life have changed dramatically. First of all, we have both moved out of isolation – me to the centre of Brussels and my blog to its own domain.

CheeseWeb is now much less focused on my day to day life and more on expat life in general. It covers a range of topics about life and travel in Belgium. I have guest posters on different topics from art to technology and I write about many different travel destinations around Europe.

Blogging opened so many doors for me in the early months of my expat life and continues to today. I honestly believe that blogging saved my expat life.

About the author:

Alison Cornford-Matheson is a garden and travel lifestyle photographer based in Brussels.  Her website, CheeseWeb has grown into a resource for expats in Belgium as well as a guide for interesting places to visit, eat and shop, but first and foremost it remains  personal journal of one expat wife, making her way in a foreign land.

Hartmut Esslinger, one early superstar of high-tech design, was responsible for the design of Apple devices in the 80s. He then developed together with Steve Jobs a prototype of a touchscreen phone whose main function was to make possible sending digital bank checks though a phone wire. This quite revolutionnary gizmo – remember that we’re then in 1983 – was part of the Snow White design language applied to the IIc and the original Mac.

Was Apple already trying to raise the buzz?

This is very exciting news. While Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android OS have been fiercly battling for the top-dog spot in the mobile OS market, Intel and Maemo have struggled to be noticed at all. Which is kind of sad, because I consider both of these platforms superior to the two major players (Nicolas already described some of Maemo 5.0′s features on the N900).

With this merger, these two currently minor players promise to become a serious competitor instead of fighting for scraps left over by Apple or Google. After all, Nokia is still the largest manufacturer of mobile handsets – it owns almost 40% of the smartphones market vs 17% for Apple according to Gartner – , and anybody watching the Linux crowd is no doubt aware of  Intel’s  immense contributions to the Linux kernel in the past few years.

I just hope they release a usable SDK to application developers A.S.A.P.  I wouldn’t want MeeGo to suffer the same fate as Maemo did:  a superior platform alone won’t sell many phones if only a handful of apps (~ 164 at the time of this writing) are available for it. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem though. Unlike Android, which has a custom Java-based virtual machine for running applications, both Moblin and Maemo currently use toolkits already well-known within the open-source community, GTK and QT (MeeGo will only support QT, however). The learning curve for new developers shouldn’t be that high.

Let’s just pray that Nokia and Intel will expedite this merger so that we won’t have to wait too long for the first handsets. Nokia had Maemo 6.0 planned for 2010-11, but I think it is safe to assume 6.0 will be dropped in favor of MeeGo.  Early 2011 would be great, but  I guess I won’t get around buying a Nexus One until then…

Passive Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots let your networks say what you cannot.

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