Garmin

Road rage much? If you've got a Garmin, you can now get your Force freak on with Darth Vader as your co-pilot.

About a year after TomTom, Star Wars characters have come to Garmin navigation devices starting with the Sith Lord himself.

Available for $12.99 from Spot It Out's GPS App Shop, Garmin.com, and Best Buy, the Vader voice package features directions such as "You have reached your destination, impressive, most impressive" and "Traffic ahead. The Emperor has foreseen it."

I bet he didn't foresee Carmageddon.

Parts of the "Star Wars" score are thrown in, as well as TIE fighter and lightsaber sound effects.

Check out the demo below. I don't know who does the voice work, but the TomTom version sounds a little more evil. … Read more

Garmin's GTU 10 is a great tool for finding lost things, provided that you had the foresight to GPS tag them in the first place.

Simply attach the unit to your outdoor pet, your backpack, or your child at the park. Using Garmin's Web app or the Garmin Tracker app for Android or iPhone, set virtual geofences to receive notifications when, for example, your pet leaves the yard. Then simply fire up the Garmin Tracker app again to locate the GTU 10 on a map. Tap "navigate" and the app will even guide you straight to … Read more

If the reports are to be believed and Garmin (and by extension the rest of the GPS market) is having a hard time selling portable navigation devices, then we're sure that its EcoRoute HD add-on modules aren't flying off the shelves. But Garmin is making the device useful to a whole new market of potential users--namely, Android fans--with the release of its Garmin Mechanic app for Android.

We'll cut to the chase: if you already own a Garmin EcoRoute HD, the Garmin Mechanic app for Android is free application that allows you to take advantage of the data provided by your car's onboard diagnostics port (OBD) to view and log very accurate fuel economy information, engine operating parameters, and trouble codes. It is very cool. However, we're sure that most people don't have an EcoRoute HD just lying around, so for the rest of you, the Garmin Mechanic app is a useful app that requires a $100 piece of hardware to operate effectively, which makes it, essentially, a $100 app--which is not so cool and a much harder sell. We prefer to see the glass as half full, so we'll be taking a look at the Garmin Mechanic app for Android from the former of the two perspectives. We took the app for a spin in a variety of vehicles to see how it handled.… Read more

Day 3 - Cannes to Grenoble

(This is the third installment of a travelogue covering CNET editor Wayne Cunningham's travels through the French Alps in a Mini Cooper Clubman. For the first installment, click here. For the second, click here.)

My computer needs an enema. After five years of hard use, it starts up slow and takes even longer to connect to Wi-Fi. In the Cannes hotel, the connection bounced on and off so much that it qualified for the NBA.

During the times that I did have a connection, I was able to plot the next day's … Read more

Day 2--Briancon to Cannes

(This is the second installment of a travelogue covering CNET editor Wayne Cunningham's travels through the French Alps in a Mini Cooper Clubman. For the first installment, click here.)

During checkout, the kindly hotelier at Mont-Dauphin advised me to stop at Saint-Veran, claiming it was the highest village in Europe. So I decided to take this 20-mile side trip on the way to Cannes. Who wouldn't want to look at the highest village in Europe? But the previous night, wanting to take another crack at the music problem, I loaded up a USB drive … Read more

Day 1--Geneva to Briancon

The maid pounded on the door, an early morning wake-up call. Well, not so early, as post-show jet lag had kicked in and I was sound asleep at 10:30 am. I had locked myself in the room for three straight days to write about the 2011 Geneva auto show, but made a quick exit, loading up a new Mini Cooper Clubman loaned by BMW for a French Alpine tour.

The car was similar to the U.S. version, a Cooper without the S, meaning a 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine. Given a choice, I would have … Read more

Sure, your GPS guides you to gas stations, hotels, and restaurants, but how about the world's largest light bulb? Or a drive-through tree? Or the famous Cadillac Ranch in Texas? RoadsideAmerica.com is now selling a $20 guide to these types of sights that integrates with Garmin GPS devices.

The RoadsideAmerica.com Attractions and Oddities guide is a set of over 5,000 add-on points of interest that can be downloaded directly to a Garmin navigation device. The guide points out roadside attractions in all 50 states, complete with photos and categories.

RoadsideAmerica.com has been cataloging strange sites … Read more

LAS VEGAS--During his keynote speech, Audi chairman Rupert Stadler said that the most exciting area for consumer electronics was not in the home, but in the car. Every year at CES, car technology has become a bigger part of the picture. And this year, Ford actually unveiled an entirely new model at the show.

Cars During his keynote speech, Ford CEO Alan Mulally brought out the Focus Electric, a new electric car due out from Ford by the end of the year. Not to be outdone, GM brought a small fleet of electric-powered two-seater pod prototypes, a model named En-v, … Read more

LAS VEGAS--There was once a time when a 4.3-inch screen on a GPS device was considered huge, but now that's just the entry level. These days it takes a retina-searing 5-inch display or larger to stand out among a sea of navigators and GPS-enabled smartphones. Along those lines, Garmin has just pulled the wraps off of its new, supersized Nuvi 2400 series of GPS navigators.

Snarky comments about the ever-enlarging portable navigation device form factor aside, the 2400 series' 5-inch screen can aid in visibility and reduce the amount of time spent scrutinizing a tiny digital map.

More … Read more