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Ovi Maps has been a focal point for Nokia in the last few weeks since they gave it all away for free, so it’s not surprising a hardware company wants to use their turn-by-turn navigation for cars.

If you’ve got an Alpine car system with a dashboard or speakers, then you’ll be able to connect your Nokia handset by either Bluetooth or USB, with navigation displayed by Ovi Maps on the dashboard. Navigation updates and music can come through your car’s speakers rather than the Nokia’s puny little speaker, and even information about the fuel levels and engine health can be integrated into Ovi Maps, so if you’re in need of fuel for example, Ovi Maps will tell you where the next petrol station is.

No products have been shown off just yet, but this Terminal Mode will be available on Nokia phones soon apparently—and with well over 3m downloads of the free Ovi Maps, upgrading your car system could prove very tantalizing

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What’s the one biggest hurdle to throwing out your dedicated GPS nav unit and going ahead with the free turn-by-turn navigation offered by your smartphone? If your answer was that most phones don’t have the great big screens or easy installation systems of some satnav devices, look out, because Nokia’s about to shake up your world all over again. Alpine has just announced its partnership with the Finnish giant aimed at integrating Nokia handsets — complete with free Ovi Maps navigation — into car dashboard systems. Yes, that means you can use your superb six-amp speaker system to boom out music or voice nav instructions from the phone, as well as your in-dash 7-inch LCD for showing you the right way home. There’s further interaction with widgets keeping an eye on your fuel levels and engine condition, leading to location-based services such as the phone notifying you of the nearest and cheapest petrol station. Connectivity is done over either USB or Bluetooth, and Nokia promises that this Terminal Mode will be showing up in its phones in the very near future. The sooner the better, we say.

We’ve spent all our time hearing about a DR-950, but today at CeBIT ASUS has trotted out a DR-900 as its first 9-inch ebook reader. It doesn’t appear manifestly different from what we’ve heard and seen already, with WiFi connectivity augmented with a 3G option, and a battery life rated to last a pretty radical 10,000 pages on a single charge. The interface on show clearly invites touch interaction, and we can fill in a few gaps with what we know of the DR-950, namely a 1024 x 768 resolution on a Sipix panel, 4GB of integrated storage, 3.5mm headphone jack, and support for PDF, TXT, MP3 and ePUB files. We’ll be tracking down an official price and release date shortly, as well as smudging a few fingerprints on these before the day is through.

A few hours after we placed our mitts around what appeared to be official Palm webOS 1.4 changelog, along comes this: confirmation from none other than Sprint itself. According to a post on the official forums by the carrier Sprint izzyks admin ‘,’ both before and Pixi will see the much anticipated Update 1.4 webOS hit some time tomorrow evening. As always, users will see an alert OTA when new files are ready for consumption, and you can find a complete list of fixes and changes just after the break.

Update: Looks like the post was removed! The message in its entirety is after the break.

Palm and pre Pixi WebOS 1.4 Software Update

On 2 / 26, Friday evening, before and Pixi device users will receive an Over The Air (OTA) notification to download the new version 1.4 software webOS.

This release includes fixes and updates to functionality (listed below).

Corrections:

* Bug fixed timezone
* Time synchronization network bug corrected to reflect the correct time network
* Bluetooth car-kit device transition to the corrected
* No icon EV bug fixed (random)
* Browser random sequences bugs
* Fixed a bug that incorrectly displayed when Sprint was actually digital roaming
* Missing issue specifically contact with swap until 1.2.9.1 or less

Feature Updates:

* Directory Transfer (Import & Export)
* Adding a video capture device and editing of
* Calendar Enhancements
* Messaging Enhancements
Improved performance (Telephone & CAL)
* Email Enhancements
* Notification Enhancements
* Adds Adobe Flash 10.0 (front only)
* NOTE: The 1.4 software adds the ability to use the 10.0 Adobe Flash plug-in that will be available shortly on the catalog Palm Appl.

The long rumored Nuvifone jump to Android is here just as we get set to kick off Mobile World Congress next week. Garmin and ASUS claim that the A50 brings “more location technology than any other smartphone” with a plethora of location-aware apps making use of a highly sensitive (though unnamed) GPS receiver. Spec-wise, the A50 packs a 3.5-inch HVGA (that’s 480×320 pixels, presumably) capacitive touchscreen with custom, finger-friendly UI, 4GB of internal storage with microSD expansion, and accelerometer for the usual portrait to landscape mode flip. The A50 uses satellite, network-based, and terrestrial sources to quickly zero in on your location and comes pre-loaded with Garmin turn-by-turn navigation, lane assist with junction view, and maps — no need to download them over the network (and risk data dead spots), eh Google. In fact, it’s ready for in-vehicle (ships with car mount and vehicle power cable) or pedestrian navigation out of the box. The A50 also brings on-device sync with Microsoft Exchange server and includes all the usual Google mobile services like search by voice, Maps with Street View, Gmail, YouTube, and Android Market. Rounding things out are a multitouch WebKit-based browser and 3 megapixel autofocus camera that automatically geo-tags your snaps. The A50 will launch in Europe in the first half of 2010 though pricing has not been announced. We’re still digging for more specs but will definitely be back with a detailed hands-on from Barcelona next week.

Update: We have an insider telling us that the device runs Android 1.6 (something we’ve seen before) and uses Qualcomm’s gpsOne platform for SatNav. Makes sense, but we won’t be able to confirm until we meet with Garmin-Asus next week at MWC.

The nüvifone G60 is a great new idea–a smartphonethat fully integrates a GPS navigator with voice, data and mobile Internet. Because the GPS is not a separate application, the G60 gives you the ability to navigate while (more…)

Garmin-Asus phones, they’re like buses aren’t they — you wait for ages to get one, then two come along at the same time. Seeking to sate as many mobile OS appetites as possible, the partner company has quickly followed up its A50 Android handset with this here M10, sporting Microsoft’s latest Windows Mobile build. As only the second WinMo 6.5.3 device around, the M10 is as up to date as you can get on the software front, though earlier word of a slightly dated 600MHz Qualcomm MSM 7227 CPU will douse some enthusiasm on the hardware side. Then again, Garmin-Asus do furnish you with 512MB of both RAM and ROM and a decent 4GB of integrated storage, so it’s not like this is going to be a slouch or anything, and the 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreen should also do a nice job of displaying the built-in turn-by-turn navigation. Location awareness is said to be ingrained in everything the phone does, with navigation functions attached to the calendar, web browser, messaging and email clients. Launch is slated for the first half of 2010, and you can quite naturally expect us to get all up close and personal with this handset at MWC next week.

Garmin GPS Phone: Garmin Asus Nuvifone G60 – AT&T GPS Phone (Brand New, No Contract, Never Activated). Garmin’s Nüvifone G60 is the only cellular phone to fully integrate the world?s best-selling GPS navigator with voice, data and m (more…)