Moon Valley Software has introduced FixDat, a new wireless communication device at the International Consumer Electronics Tradeshow (CES) on January 8th. FixDat is a wireless diagnostic tool that can be used to send and even reset the diagnostic codes of your vehicle. Connect using a wide range of devices, including your cell phone, PDA, laptop, or even Personal Computer. The product is set to hit the shelves by storm this spring with a price tag of around $150. Compare that to other cabled diagnostic devices that are much more expensive, and work with a narrower range of vehicles. This unit is compatible with 1996 and beyond passenger vehicles and light trucks, semi’s not included (sorry guys.) Whether you have a Ford, Chevy, Dodge, or Toyota, you’ll be able to use FixDat with any of them.

The CEO of Moon Valley Software, Mr. Peter Ryan, is enthusiastic about the new product. He said: “We’re very excited…Linking wirelessly to an onboard computer system with my cell phone is hot. The possibilities are endless.”

Hot huh? Well, it’ll get even hotter this summer because there are more products that will be added to the Dat family later this year. TripDat will wirelessly provide bookkeeping software, data logging and porting. Not only this, it serves as a hub for linking stereos, Global Positioning Systems, cellular phones, and other Bluetooth devices. Rental car companies, CheckDis out. FleetDat is a commercial product that will allow for communication over long distances, such as fleet management and other car rental applications. All wirelessly. Dat’s cool!

James Bond has had some pretty cool gadgets but I can never recall a more functional yet sexy gizmo as the Motorola Q in Bond’s collection. We got to play with the Q for over three months to really give it a thorough test and we’ll tell you right now, what we thought was just another gimmick turned out to be a surprising useful and enjoyable tool. With it’s built-in Internet EV-DO capabilities and the ability to let MacBooks attach to it and surf the Internet via Bluetooth, this has become one very special little guy to us. Too bad we have to give it back.

Read the entire (and very in depth) review on our Reviews page.

Watch out America, there’s a new style of Bluetooth accessories coming to our side of the hemisphere and boy does it look good! The former managing director of Nokia Mobile Phone has left to start Iqua, a company based in Finland. Iqua has quickly become a high end luxury brand in Scandinavia and Europe and now it has its eyes set on the US market.

“The Iqua Vogue” is one such product it hopes to do that with. Designed by the award-winning Finnish design studio, Salovaara & Salonen, the classy and sleek looking headset not only looks good, but SvenOnTech is told it’s a performer. With its in-ear speaker, it makes it a bit easier to believe. Iqua claims 9 hours of talk time and 200 of standby. You get 3 colors to choose from: pearl white, charcoal or pink.

We’ll keep you posted on these and other products from Iqua as we’ll be stopping by its booth at CES in January.

Have you been waiting to use the Bluetooth Serial on your handheld computer? Now you can get the most rock-solid bluetooth serial on the market. PN Technologies, www.pcables.com, is well known for rock-solid serial cables for handheld computers. The first Bluetooth Serial Adapter from PN Technologies is a no-compromise solution which is just as reliable as our serial cables. It is a Class 1 Bluetooth Radio. This means that a Tungsten E2 from Palm can easily achieve a rock solid Serial connection at 30 feet – even through walls!

ECYPH, like all PN Technologies innovations, is designed for easy serial connection to other computing products. The EBTE-M9-6 utilizes the same RS232 interface technology as our world-famous "M9-6" line of serial cables for Palm Pilots, such as the PDCT5-M9-6. This means that if you have purchased a PDCT5-M9-6 (or in fact any -M9-6) cable from www.pcables.com and it is working in your application, you can be guaranteed that the EBTE-M9-6 will make the serial connection just as well. For customers who are ready to make the move into Bluetooth Serial on their Palm Pilot, here is the most rugged and reliable solution available. To buy, log on www.pcables.com and click on the "Palm Data Cables Catalog" link on the left and order the EBTE-M9-6 from the top of the page.

When I had Vonage VoIP, I loved it’s CallVantage feature. It integrated with Outlook and let me select a contact and instantly dial it. Within seconds, my phone was ringing with the call in progress. But when I left Vonage due to lack of a data centers in the 209 area code (which it still doesn’t have) for Packet8, I lost my beloved feature. Sure, there are phone dialers that work with modems, but lots of good that does me on a MacBook Pro. Thankfully, a guy named Jon felt my pain.

Not to be confused with SvenOnTech’s own contributor, Jon is another famous Jon that develops some neat applications for the Mac. You may have seen his Docktop the last time you visited an Apple Store. You know, the little collection of applications in the middle of the screen that you could launch much like the Apple Dock but it’s in the middle of the screen. Ya, it’s sweet. Well Jon has applied the same sweetness to JPT, short for Jon’s Phone Tool.

If you’re a lucky Vonage user, you’ll be able to use JPT with it much like CallVantage which is great for Mac users since Vonage doesn’t have a Mac version of CallVantage. But if you don’t have Vonage, as I don’t anymore, then you have other choices to get that number dialed from your Mac. This list is long, but I’ll be brief with it. Methods include Bluetooth (sends the number to your mobile or one of the handful home phones with Bluetooth), VoIP, touch-tones through your speaker, and good ol’ analog modem. If you’ve bought a Mac recently, then the latter won’t apply to you as it doesn’t for me. That leaves good times with those tiny speakers (or VoIP for you Cisco cats)!

I played with JPT for maybe ten minutes before I found myself at Kagi’s site making a purchase of this fine tool. Jon knows how good his dialer is since he not only mentions the competition but even puts links to them on his FAQ page! With the its ease and power, it just was too easy not to even consider looking at the other dialers. For $15, ya, I’ll feel fine slapping out the credit card numbers via 1Passwd since it’s just that good.

A couple of things I do want to tell you potential dialer users before I conclude. First, its integration with various address books is great. It tapped right into my Entourage as well as Apple’s Address Book. Since I connect to an Exchange server, the dialer took a great amount of time to find my number I was searching for; however, Address Book was instant. Since Entourage now lets you sync with Address Book, I ended up just keeping JPT settings to use Address Book.

The other feature I wanted to let you know about is the ability to dial Mnemonics directly. For example, if you see a number that is, say, 1-800-GO-BEARS, you input that and off it dials. Very, very nice!

Again, you can’t go wrong with this dialer. It’s spot on. If you make frequent calls throughout the day and need a break on the dial-pad, let Jon’s Phone Tool help you let your fingers get a break. I did.

UPDATE: Jon let us known that Docktop was inspired by the very application found on the Macs at the Apple Store and is not the application seen there as earlier reported. Thank you, Jon, for the clarification!

Okay, we finally broke down and did the ROM update for our XV6700. Some things we noticed improvements (faster soft reset) and some things we noticed just pure silly. For example, the new voice activated software is great and works like a charm; however, when used in conjunction with the screen lock, guess what? Your Bluetooth headset button won’t work! Since the button on your headset mimics button one and that button is locked, the voice activation program can not be brought up! How lame is that?! Why bother? Shesh.

Other oddities we found was that our push mail didn’t come…even though we saw our 1xRTT connection constantly being connected. (We had to fix that real quick in the ActiveSync settings to help battery conservation.) Even though our Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks all synched from our Exchange Server, for the life of us we couldn’t get any E-mail. Finally in desperation, we unchecked the E-Mail setting in the ActiveSync Advanced settings and saved the changes and then went back and re-enabled them. Guess what we saw after a manual sync? 22 new messages found. Go figure.

We do like the Wireless Manager and how it added the Push Mail and how Wi-Fi and Phone both work together without the need of a registry hack. And oh yes, we can verify that our little Bluetooth DUN hack still works.

So you got a cell phone and an iPod, huh? You find yourself in need of a device to allow you to listen to your iPod but notify you of an incoming call and tend to that call. Guess what? Tekkeon’s got you covered with its myTalker.

We got one and gave it a whirl for a couple of weeks and boy did we love it. Find out why.

For Palm(R) Treo(TM) smartphone users and GPS enthusiasts, Palm Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) today announced the Palm GPS Navigator Smartphone Edition, featuring new TomTom NAVIGATOR 6 software. Drivers using the new GPS Navigator with their Treo smartphones can rely on voice-guided, turn-by-turn directions to easily find their destinations as well as millions of points of interest, including gas stations, restaurants, parks, airports and more. TomTom NAVIGATOR 6 is available today exclusively for Palm’s GPS Navigator Smartphone Edition.

Palm’s new Bluetooth(R) enabled SiRFstarIII(TM) GPS receiver, which features a sleek design and easier-to-see LED lights, seamlessly pairs with Palm Treo 650, Treo 700w and Treo 700p smartphones. The product is simple to set up, thanks to a 1GB memory card preloaded with maps. Travelers simply pop the memory card into their Treo smartphone and pair the GPS receiver to access highway and street-level maps covering the United States and Canada. No desktop syncing or downloading of maps is required. Using the smartphone’s high-resolution screen, TomTom’s NAVIGATOR 6 software automatically shows the receiver’s (and hence, the car’s) current location.

“Smartphones are expanding the market for mobile navigation,” said Jim Schwabe, general manager of accessories for Palm, Inc. “The beauty is that this powerful GPS solution is always readily available because it’s part of something people are carrying anyway — their Treo smartphone.”

“The convergence of portable navigation devices is growing in the United States,” said Jocelyn Vigreux, president of TomTom. “Palm’s bundle offering with TomTom’s new NAVIGATOR 6 software reflects our joint efforts to continue providing customers with essential smartphone solutions. The Treo smartphone series provides an ideal platform for portable navigation.”

TomTom is the leading provider of personal navigation products and services. TomTom NAVIGATOR 6 software offers coast-to-coast and cross-border navigation, as well as new and enhanced options. New features include trip planning based on preferred arrival time, speed-limit information and integrated navigation to the smartphone’s contact list.

How It Works

The Bluetooth technology-enabled receiver identifies the car’s position using satellites. By communicating with the GPS receiver via Bluetooth, the Treo smartphone obtains real-time location information and displays 3-D maps on the Treo smartphone’s high-resolution screen. After a destination has been programmed, TomTom NAVIGATOR gives voice-guided, turn-by-turn instructions in one of more than 30 available voices. It will also automatically recalculate a route after a wrong turn, avoid roadblocks or circumvent traffic congestion.

Pricing and Availability

At $299 (estimated U.S. street price), Palm’s GPS Navigator Smartphone Edition includes a Bluetooth enabled SiRFstarIII GPS receiver, TomTom NAVIGATOR 6 software featuring the latest Tele Atlas(R) maps, a 1GB memory card with preloaded maps of the continental United States and Canada, a vehicle device cradle with windshield mount and a charging system.

The GPS Navigator from Palm is now available at Palm’s online and retail stores.

Source Palm, Inc

iGo manages to take all of your various power supplies of all your electronic items and condense it into one “brick” with individual small little tips to match your devices power input. By doing this, you lighten your load for powering your devices on the go to nearly nothing and add smart to your tech warrior title.

You once had to share power time with the iGo strip and wait until your little gadget was done charging before hooking up the next one to replenish its battery. Well, now you can juice up two at a time with the new iGo Splitter!

iGo told SvenOnTech that the new splitter when used with a compatible iGo adapter will, “charge and power two mobile devices simultaneously, such as a mobile phone, Bluetooth accessory, MP3 player and more.” Compatible devices would include iGo auto/air40, everywhere15, auto15 elite, everywhere, auto and wall power adapters and dualpower accessory.

For $15, this is a great addition to an already excellent family of power accessories. If you don’t have an iGo set-up for your electronics, then I highly recommend you go purchase the whole package before your next trip. You’ll thank me for it!

Okay, here’s one we at SvenOnTech got way wrong. We thought the Mighty Mouse would go wireless back in January at Macworld but as you all know, it didn’t. Well Apple has finally done the little critter justice and removed its tail so the Mighty Mouse could fly…or get lost because one of your children removed it from your desk for a play toy. The Wireless Mighty Mouse doesn’t add much to the white Apple mouse with one small little ball on it other than two AA batteries and an extra $20 to the price.

So if you need the mightiest mouse off all time to be not tethered down, then hit the Apple Store and slap your $69 down today and get it!