It’s great for the car on your way to a meeting
Lowell Conn
Province
Hook up the water-proofed Boyo VTC461R rear-view camera and shift your vehicle into reverse safely.
The ultimate improbable car gadget, Planon’s Printstik PS910, is a portable car printer that prints documents from a PDA or laptop via hardwire or Bluetooth. This product is so compact that people are more likely to mistake it for a blunt weapon than an office accessory.
It also is so small that it prints on a special roll exclusively designed for it. With print speeds of up to three pages per minute, it’s not the quickest printer. But when you need that small document printed on the way to a meeting, desperate times call for desperate measures. The accompanying software even allows BlackBerry users to print from their devices.
Weighing in at only 0.68 kilograms and featuring a battery that will print 30 pages on one charge, it may not be ideal for printing epic-sized tomes. $300;
visit www.planon.com.
A CB gets BT
While CB radios have not penetrated beyond a certain niche market, we wonder whether Cobra’s newly unveiled 29 LTD BT CB Radio will break this trend. Modelled after the popular 29 LTD series, it adds Bluetooth technology for easy transmission of cellphone calls. It does not technically solve the dilemma of freeing up your hands, but individuals who need a CB will see this as a natural evolution to making their radio a one-stop communication shop. Providing access to emergency channels as well as tactile control to keep drivers’ eyes on the road, it arrives with a noise-cancelling microphone and five-watt speaker that offers more than enough listening power.
We suspect there may be a retro-edgy subculture of drivers who may have an interest in mounting this device on their compact’s dashboard. $190; visit www.cobra.com.
Safe, cool, entertaining
It is always gratifying when a safety gadget happens to be a cool gadget, too. Boyo’s VTC461R falls into this category.
It’s a rear-view camera combined with a 15-centimere colour mirror monitor that also serves as a DVD monitor. Consumers need only attach the waterproof-housed camera to the licence-plate frame, clip the video monitor over the rear-view mirror and switch the car into reverse. A video feed from the rear-view camera will immediately turn on, helping drivers back up safely. The monitor and camera connect to one another through a wireless 2.4-GHz transmitter, $300; visit www.boyovta.com.
© The Vancouver Province 2008
