There are a few more products from CES I wanted to fill you in on. One I met with before CES (TeleNav), one I missed my meeting with (Trimble Outdoors) and the other was a spur-of-the-moment thing (Polaroid’s Media Backup Drives).
TeleNav makes GPS solutions for mobile devices. (Trimble does, too, for that matter.) TeleNav’s big announcement for CES was that it’ll have the first mobile phone-based GPS navigation service with intelligent traffic notification and rerouting functionality. Initially only available to Sprint customers using the $9.99-per-month TeleNav GPS Navigator service, TeleNav Traffic will—for no additional charge through June 30, 2007, $3.99 a month thereafter—regularly monitor traffic and proactively alert you of slowdowns and incidents along your route. And most importantly, with a single button press it will reroute you according to the latest traffic conditions.
The new GPS solution from Trimble Outdoors (also initially only available to Sprint customers) is the GuideWorx GPS application. Unlike most other GPS-on-cell-phone solutions, it’s designed for both on- and off-road navigation.
The software, developed with Networks In Motion’s NAVBuilder platform, provides content-rich trip planning information either on your phone or a PC and on-the-go driving and recreational navigation with point-of-interest info. You can also use the GPS to mark locations of photos and audio clips you’ve recorded with your phone for sharing with others.
Expect it to be available the first quarter of 2007 on select Sprint GPS-enabled mobile phones for $9.99 per month.
Finally, right before CES, I received Polaroid’s ClickFree-powered Photo Backup Drive in the mail. The PR guy flagged me down on the floor as I was going to another meeting, so I stopped for a few minutes to talk to Gary Connell, the VP of Business Development for Storage Appliance Corp., the company behind the ClickFree platform.
He gave me a demo of the product, which is in fact click free. Just connect the drive and an interface pops open and starts a countdown. You can either choose to let the app do its job or stop and handle things more manually. If you go the click-free route, it’ll hunt down all your image (and video, too) files and back them up to the drive.
To be clear, this drive is designed for people that likely don’t know a .JPG from a .TIF or where they’ve been saving their photo files to once they get them off their digital cameras. It’s also great if you don’t want to concern yourself with setting up routine back ups of your photos. It just does its job and does it well.
The current storage size is 40GB and since real shutterbugs will probably need more space, there are preliminary plans to larger sizes. There are also some plans to make versions for office documents and music, but Connell said nothing was set just yet.