Ford is busy showing off a new concept car at IFA 2011 in Berlin this week, and it’s being dubbed the Evos Concept. This concept car is all about being a car that adapts to a driver by providing a seamlessly connected and personalized experience. For starters, the Evos uses the driver’s ‘personal cloud’ of information to do things like automatically playing the same music or news program that was just streaming at home, or heating or cooling the interior to just the right temperature before the driver gets in.

Using, adaptive vehicle technologies, the car is able to learn the driver’s habits and capabilities. It accomplishes this by monitoring the physical state and workload of the driver and adjusting the driving experience accordingly – all while maintaining a connection to the cloud. The car is also a hybrid, and is is able to automatically figure out when to save energy and switch modes by using information about the car’s predicted travel route, and any emission zone restrictions during the journey – along with the current weather conditions.

The design of the car itself is quite futuristic chic with its “dramatic” four-door, four-seat fastback concept along with its complementing in-car lithium-ion plug-in hybrid powertrain previews. And although this is just a concept car, and we know how those usually work, Ford does say that this car is a true vision of the future. So although we’re hesitant to believe that a car looking this neat will roll out from Ford soon, we’re confident that the technologies inside of it aren’t too far off from becoming apart of Ford’s SYNC system.

There are many in-car systems that are designed to integrate with your iPhone, but Oxygen Audio O CAR takes iPhone integration to the next level. The Oxygen Audio O CAR is the first car radio that has been specifically built for the iPhone, from the ground up. Say goodbye to Aux cables, FM transmitters and Bluetooth adapters, this system lets you click your device into the O Car dock and then you can adjust the cradle for landscape or portrait use.  From there on you can use your iPhone and all its apps. The O Car is ideal for using with GPS navigation apps as well as apps like Pandora.

In addition, the O CAR features a built-in RDS-enabled AM/FM tuner, Bluetooth connectivity, and a 4-channel, 55-watt amp that is able to connect to a car’s speaker system. Originally announced last January at CES 2011, the O Car is finally available for sale in the U.S. for $299.95.

Sony announced a whole new Car Stereo line-up today, including a whole bunch of in-car stereos that sport iPhone and Pandora support. But in particular, we’re most excited about the DSX-S310BTX with built-in bluetooth. This in-car stereo is extra special because it is able to wirelessly stream Pandora radio from an Android or BlackBerry device, on-to your car stereo. It’s actually the first of its kind to offer Pandora integration with Android and BlackBerry in such a manner. Using its 4-line OEL display, users can access their personalized Pandora stations and even leaving ratings directly on the player.

On top of that, the DSX-S310BTX is also iPhone compatible via USB. It also features dual USB 1-wire inputs, and the SensMe application for help organizing better playlists.

Finally, Sony has also introduced several other new car stereos with support for SiriusXM which cost as little as $90. Meanwhile their new car stereo line-up with Pandora support starts at $130.

Jabra, the leader of the Hands-Free market, has recently launched a 3-speaker, virtual surround, all-in-one speakerphone. The Jabra Freeway easily clips to the visor and assists with crystal clear wireless phone calls and A2DP audio streaming. It even has a built-in FM transmitter in case you would prefer to use your car speakers for music and phone calls. Connect up to two bluetooth devices at once and use your voice to make and take calls.

What’s in the Box

-Jabra Freeway Speakerphone
-1x Micro-USB Cable
-1x Car USB Adapter (Cigarette Lighter Plug)

Design

The Jabra Freeway is packed with great features, but even more impressive is the design. It’s super sleek and smooth looking with some really nice curves. At it’s thickest point it’s not even one inch. The metal clip that affixes the Freeway to a visor is strong and dual-functions as a stand for the device while it’s sitting on a surface. The Freeway is covered in matte black plastic, with a black mesh speaker cover and white text. There are six buttons on the device’s face: the largest button on the top is the phone button, underneath this is “FM” for transmitting, and “Voice” for voice activated commands. On the bottom is volume down, mute, and volume up. On the side of the device is a hard on/off switch, a micro-USB connection, and the microphone. The device weighs just 150 grams

Features

The Jabra Freeway offers loud and clear audio with its 3 speakers. With the Freeway you can use your voice to make and take hands-free calls. There are voice alerts that will announce the name of the caller, the battery level, how to pair your phone, and the connection status. The Freeway can connect up to two bluetooth devices at once. There are two microphones which work together to reduce unwanted background noise. You can stream A2DP (two-channel) audio from your device and play it over the Freeway speaker, whether it be music, podcasts, audio books, or directions from a GPS app. You can also play audio from your computer via the included Micro-USB cable. Should you prefer to play music or phone calls through your car speaker you can use the built-in FM transmitter to transmit to a radio station. The battery can last up to 14 hours of talk time and up to 40 days of standby time.

The Freeway provides easy pairing with Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR & eSCO. It supports Bluetooth profiles: HFP, HSP, A2DP, AVRCP, and PBAP.

Performance

Aside from the sleek design, the best aspect of Jabra’s Freeway is it’s ease of use. Once it’s paired to a bluetooth device it’s a piece of cake. There’s a physical on/off switch, and it immediately turns on and pairs (no need to hold a button down until it’s on). The rechargeable battery can standby for 40 days, so you technically don’t have to worry about turning it off. With heavy usage, you only really need to charge the device once a week. The Freeway will walk you through the pairing process with voice prompts. You’ll be able to make and take phone calls without a problem, though to get the most out of the Freeway, it’s worth breezing through the manual. For instance, double tapping the phone button ignores the call, you can also transfer calls by holding the phone button. It’s also helpful to learn the different voice commands that are available (alternatively, you can press the voice button and say “What can I say?”). You can still dial or answer directly from your phone while Freeway handles the speakerphone aspect. The large volume and mute buttons are helpful and easy to press.

For the size of the device, the audio is darned impressive. At a regular volume, streaming music sounds clear with surprising bass and nice treble. Only at the loudest volumes did the audio start to sound tinny and degraded, but this was not a surprise for such a small speaker producing such big sound. The bass really packs an impressive amount of oomph. The audio gets loud enough to provide ample tunes for a small apartment. It’s certainly loud enough for the inside of any car. The speakerphone for phone calls sounded great too, it’s loud and clear with only occasional static. Inside the car, my callers said I sounded great; they couldn’t even tell I was on the speakerphone, even driving on the highway. While inside of the apartment, and distanced from the Freeway, my caller reported I sounded loud and clear but it was apparent I was not near the microphone.

The Jabra Freeway worked almost perfectly with my iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3.1). I make calls and take calls wirelessly, I control my music with voice commands, and I can access iPhone’s voice activation feature to make specific music requests or call specific contacts. The only issue I had was that my callers were announced as “unknown”.

Conclusion

The Jabra Freeway Bluetooth Speakerphone is a safe and effective way to go hands-free in the car or in your home. It’s also considerably easier than using a bluetooth headset, and with a lot more features. The beautifully designed device is sleek, light, and well built. It features a very long battery life, a loud and respectable speaker, noise cancelling microphones, built-in FM transmitting, and voice activation inside of an easy-to-use interface. If you have not went hands-free inside of the car yet, then the Jabra Freeway should be seriously considered. Jabra’s Freeway is currently available on Amazon for $126.43.

The Good: Sleek Design, Physical On/Off button, Speaker Gets Loud, Speaker Sounds Great at Moderate Levels, Easy-To-Use, Voice Commands, Latest Bluetooth Profiles, Micro-USB charger
The Bad: Speaker gets worse at highest volume (more apparent with Music), Announced Callers were “Unknown”

(Via MotorTrend)

Do you often misplace your keys? Well this key holder is sure to keep them safe. The Buckle Up Key Holder is produced from discontinued car seat belt buckles, so that you’ll really be buckling up your keys each time you put them away in this key holder. The Buckle Up Key Holder retails for $27.

The controls are OK, some maneuvers need a little bit to get used to. To get around, it is easily all controlled by the D-Pad with a jump action and your right thumb stick to move your view. You can also get around by swinging with a built in hook from your bionic arm, which is rather difficult. First you must aim and make sure the surface is able to be hooked, then you line up and fire your hook, from here you can either pull yourself right to the structure or grapple your way to a roof. You can also use it to swing from a light post to a monorail, the possibilities are limitless but when you have 5 or 6 guys hunting you down and shooting at you, trying to fiddle with this when you only have mere seconds to move can be challenging to say the least.

The weapons are pretty good, anything from your classic 9mm to a shot gun, You can only carry 48 rounds at a time on most weapons so if you are a trigger happy shooter type, I would seek out a cheat code for unlimited ammo and weapons. To aim you will see your circle target light up red when you are on target otherwise it will be white. You can zoom in by pressing your right thumb stick in. This would be a great feature for some other shooter games to put into play.

The graphics are decent during the game, similar to looks of the recent Capcom game, Resident Evil. One thing that I did not find to be helpful is in areas of radiation, lighting seemed to be an issue. Areas affected by radiation  are defined by a glowing blue color, these are areas you should not venture into, you will die within a few seconds. However due to the lighting, it is hard to actually tell which is a contaminated area, from above it is much easier to tell, but that does not help you when you are on the move on the ground.To get around there is no map, just your immediate target area is highlighted in the corner of the screen. You need to keep following your relays to stay on path. This was ok, but I still would prefer a full map feature. It is difficult when you are completely lost and cannot figure out how to get around buildings and radiation.

Sometimes classic games shouldn’t be messed with and even though it lacked the fancy schmancy graphics of this latest version. I still enjoyed the retro Bionic Commando much more. For those who are to young to remember the classic version, probably will enjoy this even with the frustrating movements of the bionic arm, those who remember the good ole’ days will probably not appreciate the remake. Bionic Commando retails for $39.79.

Good: As always Capcom doesn’t let us down with awesome graphics and a decent storyline.

Bad: Controls could be frustrating. Bionic arm was more of a pain than it was worth trying to get it to work, before getting killed.

Can’t afford a real DeLorean time machine for yourself? Here is the next best thing. The Back to the Future II DeLorean Vehicle is an exclusive from Entertainment Earth. It’s got special wheels that pop up for “flight mode”, the wheels also spin, the gull-wing doors open, and it has got electronic lights and sounds to complement all this action. The description even says that the car can fit in 3 3/4 inch scale action figures such as Hasbro’s G.I. Joes and Star Wars lines. Hey, at least your action figures will be able to time travel now. The Exclusive Back to the Future II DeLorean Vehicle is up for preorder for $34.99.

Who says you only get calories and pimples from chocolate? Climate Change Chocolate bars are as educational as they are delicious with a glass of milk. Each one comes with a wrapper with 15 tips for easing your impact on the environment. Each tip teaches you how to save energy by making small changes to your everyday habits. “Climate Change Chocolate comes with a verified TerraPass offset of 133 pounds of carbon dioxide reductions, the average American’s daily carbon impact. ” Even the carbon emissions of each candy bar has been measured and balanced out. Climate Change Chocolate Bars retail for $14.50 as a gift set at TerraPass.

Read on below for a full description of Archive.

Black vegan leather laptop carrier with 100% recycled gray faux suede lining, tone on tone stitching, antique silver hardware, and MATT & NAT logo bar. The Archive features top double zip closure, 2 external zipper pockets on front and 1 external zipper pocket on back. Interior includes zip, cell phone and PDA pockets, 3 pen holders and protective laptop sleeve. Comes with detachable, adjustable shoulder strap

Regulations: Matt & Nat and ChipChick.com are not responsible for any lost packages or incorrect shipping addresses. The prize is not redeemable in cash and must be accepted as awarded. Approximate value of prizes may vary. By claiming the prize, the winner authorizes the use, without additional compensation of his or her name and/or likeness and/or voice/photograph and municipality of residence for promotion and/or advertising purposes in any manner and in any medium (including without limitation over the internet and picture data storage).

The FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player is a pretty unique product, and in some ways it’s the first of its kind. There are an assortment of multimedia hard drives out there that are designed to carry multimedia content like videos and music from your computer that will play on to your TV. However, with these types of products you are locked in to that specific hard drive. The FreeAgent Theater on the other hand is just a hub. In a way you can think of it as a DVD or VHS player with its own built in software that plays movies off of a medium. In this case, the medium’s format is actually the popular Seagate FreeAgent Go Harddrives.

The FreeAgent Theater hooks up to your TV to play video, photo and audio files off of a docked FreeAgent Go Hard Drive. So lets say you downloaded some videos (torrents, cough) that you would like to watch on your TV instead of being constrained to your computer, all you have to do is sync the video or photo or audio file on to your FreeAgent Go hard drive and then dock the hard drive in to the FreeAgent Theater which in turn connects to your TV. If you have several FreeAgent Hard drives, you can easily swap them out. Want to set a side one FreeAgent Go hard drive for photos, while another one just for your Dr. Who collection? You can keep it organized in that way too and when you’re ready to play the files, just plop it in to the FreeAgent Theater. You can even rip DVDs on to the hard drive so that you can essentially play DVDs on the FreeAgent Theater, complete with menus and subtitles. The FreeAgent Theater also sports an impressive amount of support for different file formats. Here are the specs from Seagate themselves.

Supported Formats:
Video: MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (AVI/DivX /Xvid)
Subtitles: SAMI(smi), SRT and SUB
Video resolutions: NTSC 480i/480p; PAL 576i/576p, supports video (HD and upscaling) up to 720p/1080i*
Audio: MP3, AC3 (5.1 audio – Dolby® Digital) WMA, WAV, OGG
Photo: JPEG files up to 20 megapixels
* supports MPEG-4, Xvid up to 1280 x 720 60fps and supports MPEG-2 and photos up to 1920 x 1080i 30 fps

Design:
The FreeAgent Theater itself is easily portable, and pretty lightweight. It’s got a glossy black exterior that wlll blend in well with most home theater systems, yet it’s much smaller than your average home theater component – size-wise it’s on par with that of a portable DVD player. You can easily transport it to a friend’s house and share your videos and multimedia, by just hooking it up to their TV. A small black remote is also included with the FreeAgent Theater.

Set-up:
The FreeAgent theater comes with simple fold out set up guide and a software disc containing Windows-only software. The FreeAgent Theater software lets you manage the different FreeAgent Go drives you may be using with the FreeAgent Theater. It also enables you to easily sync your media files on to a FreeAgent Go Drive, automatically or manually. The software is straightforward and easy to use. However, Mac users are out of luck. Also, even though the device supports VOB files from DVDs, the system does not come with DVD ripping software, so you’ll be left to your own resourcefulness if you want to transfer the contents of a DVD on to the FreeAgent Theater.

Interface:
The interface is clean and very easy to use. It is designed much like other Media Center software, though not quite as sleek as something like Windows Media Center. Even novice users will be able to get up and running with the interface right away.

Video Quality:
The device has the ability to playback HD videos up to 720p/1080i via upscaling. In practice, video files and photos – especially HD video, looked good on my 42″ 720P Samsung Plasma. We played back a 720P AVI file that had been filmed on a digital camera and also tested a HD DIVX movie file. Both played back without a hitch and were pleasant to watch on screen. Photos looked good on screen as well. The FreeAgent Theater will automatically turn your photos into a slideshow.

You can connect the FreeAgent Theater to your TV via Composite, S-video, or Component video connections, and for audio – the FreeAgent Theater provides Stereo, and coaxial S/PDIF connections. AV Cables are included to connect the FreeAgent Theater to your TV. However, if you have an HDTV – you’re gonna want to use component cables if you really want to experience the best image possible.

Conclusion:
Another notable feature of the FreeAgent Theater to its credit, is that it can connect to other drives via a USB connection. However, one aspect of this system that does concern us is that while the FreeAgent Go Hard drives do have a solid shelf life, eventually the FreeAgent Go hard drives will be updated with new models. So our question is, what will happen when you want to buy additional hard drives to use with the FreeAgent Theater for docking? We hope that Seagate has the foresight to make future hard drive models compatible with the system as well.

The FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player delivers an easy to use home theater experience for those who want to easily playback their multimedia files on their Televisions. It’s a great affordable alternative to complex media center PCs and other wireless solutions. The device is easy to set up and to use, and it also is conveniently portable. Unfortunately we’re disappointed in the lack of Mac support and we long for at-least a native resolution of 720p and an HDMI port so that users could really appreciate the advantages of bringing their multimedia files on to the big HDTV screen in their living room. That said, we imagine that the FreeAgent Theater will be popular with pack rats who have a lot of saved and downloaded media that they’d like to unlock off of their PCs and experience on the big screen. Also, in a way, the FreeAgent Theater is the answer to a modern day projector. Thus, it should also be popular with families who want to easily share and present movies, photos, etc without too much expense and complication involved. The FreeAGent Theater HD Media Player retails for $129.99 without a FreeAgent Go hard drive. Packages with a 250GB drive and a complimenting FreeAgent Go dock are available for $229.99 and a version with a 500GB hard drive retails for $279.99 .

The good:
Very easy to use, Solid amounts of files supported including Divx support, can play off ripped DVD files, portable, good video quality, good user interface

The Bad:
Software not available for Mac, would have liked to see HDMI included.

Update 03/09/09: While the FreeAgent Theater does not support MOV formats out-of-the-box, third-party software is available to convert MOV (H.264) video to either MPEG-2, Xvid or DivX format which can then be viewed using FreeAgent Theater. The FreeAgent Theater media player also supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats, and DIVX files with video resolutions for NTSC, PAL and HD up to 1080i and even provides support for subtitles.

Update 03/17/09: It turns out that Mac users are not totally left out in the cold if they want to use the FreeAgent Theater. If someone wants to use their Mac with the FreeAgent Theater – they must connect a hard drive to it that is a FAT 32 formatted drive. In which case they could connect an external hard drive via the USB port on the FreeAgent Theater, or they could reformat a FreeAGent Go drive to Fat32 and then be able to use their Mac to drag and drop files on to it.