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Car Digital Assistant
suman28 writes "The Japanese company Clarion plans to sell a car with built-in PC that runs Windows which car browse the web, play tunes and store an address manager. The stats on the computer are nice - a 166 MHz RISC processor with 64MB RAM and 8MB video. That seems like a lot for a car."
Windows CE.
Uh. Did you even read the article? It runs Windows CE for Automotive.
Microsoft has been developing "AutoPCs" for ages.
why bother witha 8mb video card, the resolution of a in-car monitor is at best awful, never mind trying to read 9px fonts
Windows and a 8mb card is a good choice because think of all the yummy plugins for Winamp that can be used !, i can have a great looking stereo and visual extravaganzer with all the visulisation plugins and dsp extras, be silly to choose anything else with winamps kind of support/community
A bit OT, but my friend's new Jaguar X-something here in the UK won't even let you alter anything on the GPS/nav unit while the car is moving.
Just as well, seeing how bad some drivers are anyway (anyone see Britain's Worst Drivers last night?).
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
"The Japanese company Clarion plans to sell a car with (...)"
Clarion is not a car manufacturer but instead a car music system manufacturer. I suppose they will sell this as an aftermarket upgrade or (car) manufacturer pre-installed in high end models.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
First, the real answer, as has been given before (so this can be mod-ed "redundant"): The current version of Windows CE runs on Arm, SH3, SH4, Mips and x86. Previous versions also ran on PowerPC. I'm sure somewhere in that list you can find something that could be considered RISC.
And Microsoft supported running Windows 2000 on the Alpha until after Windows 2000 RC1 came out. The final release was x86 only, but some crazy people actually run their Alpha boxes on Windows 2000 RC1. I think RC1 was in 1999. (and this part can be mod-ed "offtopic")
[2 + (-1 Redundant) + (-1 Offtopic) = 0]
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Unfortunately for me, most of the Japanese is in images, so babelfish didn't help too much..
Enjoy!
front view
screen: menu
screen: website
screen: gps mapping
A phone (with Cadias printed on it?)
Said handybundler:
Here's the deal; any system from a manufacturer like Clarion, Alpine, Kenwood, etc. has a switched lead that is generally run to the parking brake. Thus, the only time the screen becomes active is when the parking brake is engaged. Otherwise, there is a small LCD display, much like any other radio, and the driver uses the buttons like any other radio.
The rub to this is, nothing requires you to have the unit installed by a responsible and certified installer, who will wire this safety device accordingly. I could buy one of these units, slap it in the dash, and just wire the trigger lead to a pushbutton switch to use it whenever I wanted to. I imagine, though, that if (or more appropriately, When) I got in a car accident while watching TV, the cop would see the screen sticking out of the dash and bust my ass for it.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Never heard of the Empeg aka. RioCar players?
Car mp3 player that ran Linux. 233MHz strongarm, 12MB of memory, takes 2 standard 2.5" drives so you can put 120GB in there.
Sound quality is really high end, 4 channel, 20 band parametric EQ. And it is removable, so you can take it out of your car to reduce the risk of theft. On the removable player unit are 10BaseT ethernet, serial and a USB slave port to hook it up to a PC and upload new music.
A very active 3rd party hardware and software development community has come up with wonderful gems like a digital SPDIF outputs, lighted button kits, alternative screen filters. And it is extremely hackable software wise, there are a lot of things from telnet/ftp/http daemons to a pacman game.
Retail price was ~$1400-1600, so almost half the price of this WinCE thing. And why do I talk about this in the past tense?
The company had to EOL the product, there was no market for it.
Customer support even for the EOL'd product is perfect. And the there are still new updates of the player software coming out. If the grapevine is any good, the next beta will possibly have Ogg support.