Garmin has announced a bushel of new products at this year’s CeBIT, included updates to the nüvi line of “pocket-sized” GPS units. Both the nüvi 360 and the nüvi 310 now have built-in Bluetooth wireless, which allows hands-free mobile calling, among other phone-related tricks. That’s handy if you’re using the nüvi in a car-mount, but probably less so if you’re carrying the lithium ion battery-powered units in your pocket.

On the other hand, you won’t get nearly as much use out of the Language, Travel, or Savers Guides, all of which are additional content available on SD cards (for an extra purchase). nüvi features from older models, including MP3 support and 2D or 3D map rendering, remain.

The nüvi 360 also supports the RDS-TMC standard, which allows for traffic updates to be picked up and integrated with GPS data using an optional receiver.

You’ll pay good cash for the flexibility of the device, with a suggested price of nearly a grand when the nüvi 360 launches in June of this year. And that’s before any upgrades.

The 310, which includes only map data for portions of Europe and not the whole continent, should be available for slightly less.

From Gizmodo

If you like your phones super skinny and encased in metal, Motorola’s RAZR and SLVR have just gotten themselves some serious new competition in the BenQ-Siemens EL71 slider phone, announced today at CeBIT. Brushed aluminum and magnesium! Only 16.mm thick! A keypad that glides out gently! You’d probably be going out on the town more if you had this phone, the better to show it off.

For a phone that’s meant first and foremost to be stylish, the EL71 is no slouch feature-wise—unlike, say, Nokia’s first fashion phones. The camera is 1.3 megapixels with a flash and will do video, it has Bluetooth, takes microSD cards and will play MP3s and AAC files. The Music Cable IHM-100 accessory lets you plug it into any hifi system and play your music over speakers, so maybe you wouldn’t bring your iPod around so much anymore.

Price for the EL71 is still TBA, but it should hit markets next month in “Quartz Anthracite”; Opal Black” is to follow. If BenQ Mobile is serious about taking consumers away from Motorola, perhaps they should consider putting it out in pink, no?

We’ll try and get an EL71 in for review later this month, before it goes on sale. We’ll have more on the other handsets BenQ-Siemens announced at CeBIT as the week progresses.

Finest quality mobile design: The ultra-slim BenQ-Siemens EL71 slider phone with metal casing and QVGA display [BenQ Mobile]
BenQ-Siemens Announces Six New Handsets [Gizmodo]

From Gizmodo

 

BenQ Mobile’s just announced six new phones at CeBIT ‘06, including the P51 smartphone at left. It runs Windows Mobile 5.0 OS, has a 2.83” QVGA TFT color touchscreen (240×320 pixels), Bluetooth, Push email (like the Blackberry), a 1.3 megapixel camera, USB and an integrated GPS receiver.

The first phone in BenQ-Siemens’s new P Class series of smartphones, the P51 is WLAN-enabled so users can surf the web and make VoIP calls with Skype—the latter being a feature we see on more and more smartphones every week except that most are too slow for it to actually be usable, which probably won’t be the case with this phone. It should be going on sale in July, price is still TBA. We’ll have a review of it before then.

The other handsets announced were the EL71, C81, CF61, CL71 and E61; we’ll talk more about each one over the next few days.

Smart business: The P51 combines navigation and communication for professional users [BenQ Mobile]
BenQ Mobile further expands product portfolio at CeBIT [BenQ Mobile]

From Gizmodo

The Toshiba Satellite M100 Series Notebook PC is now available, and it’s got pretty good specs, especially considering its lower-than-usual price.

Inside is an Intel Core Duo T2300 chip running at 1.83GHz. Its 14-inch diagonal widescreen display has a native resolution of 1280×768, and it also includes 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM and a 60GB serial ATA disk. It’s not too heavy, either, at 5.2 pounds, and at $1317, its price is right, too.

Toshiba Satellite M100 Series Notebook PC

From Gizmodo

 

It’s an XP Tablet PC with a 7-inch display. Sorry, that’s about it, nothing earth-shattering here folks. In fact, for all the hype, it’s hard to find anything revolutionary or even evolutionary in the hardware specs or loaded software (perhaps that will come when the price is announced). Sure, Samsung did call it a prototype unit, but as the final prototype prior to manufacture we’re told not much will change besides a “brighter TFT LCD.”

Now, beyond what we saw earlier today, Samsung will release their UMPC / Origami device with optional GPS and DMB (and presumably DVB too, eventually) mobile digital TV expansion modules, as well as WiBRO support for when that goes live in Korea around June. The version we grabbed, the Q1, also supports Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and sports a 30GB hard disk. Unfortunately the whole thing just felt wrong in the hands – very plasticy and without substance.

From Engadget