If you have ever had to get your car worked on at the shop or have looked under the dash by the drivers legs you may have noticed the little port on your computer controlled car. That Port is the OBD II port and it allows the shop to see any errors or warnings that the car’s computer has recorded.

That same port can be used by the driver to glean data about their ride if they have the right equipment. Garmin has announced a cool new device called the ecoRoute hd that plugs into that OBD II port and wirelessly sends information about your car to compatible Garmin GPS units.

The last time I took my family on vacation without a GPS, I was irritated before we got out of town. I tried to let my wife read the map, which was a bad idea. Perhaps schools should teach basic map reading to girls when they take them out of class that one day during health to learn about girly parts and pregnancy. The easy remedy to this is to use GPS, which can be a marriage saver.

Garmin has announced a new GPS device called the nuvi 1490T that has a thin profile and a large 5-inch screen. The large screen is touch enabled and can save five different routes to allow route planning in advance.

Ask anybody and they’ll tell you Apple invented the iPod. Not entirely correct according to Apple themselves, who has credited a UK man as author of some of the original patents that outlined how today’s PMPs work. Kane Kramer had no idea about iPods back then, but he sketched out a rudimentary media player in 1979. Sadly, financial difficulties in 1988 meant he couldn’t renew the patent and so it entered the public domain. Apple then used the concept as evidence in their legal case against Burst.com, who were accusing the company of patent infringement and looking for a slice of iProfits.

Kramer’s PMP was called the IXI, and stored only 3.5 minutes of audio and oddly enough it even looks just a bit like what eventually became the iPod. The inventor had to endure ten hours being questioned by Burst’s legal team, who had claimed that the intellectual property of four patents they held was being used by Apple without payment or agreement. Obviously now that Apple has fessed up, Kramer is looking at some kind of compensation. Apple did give Kramer a free iPod that apparently broke after several months. Sadly if not for the lawsuit Kramer may have lived in relative obscurity and we would never have known.

CaseCruzer got a new laptop case for mobile warriors who want solid protection for their Apple MacBook Pros. It is called the CaseCruzeer Pelican 1490 Laptop Case  and we believe it to be pricing around $120.

The CaseCruzer Pelican 1490 Laptop Case attempts to blend good looks into the CaseCruzer line up, which isn’t normally none for stylish cases. Besides that you’ll find it offering lots of protection for your 15-inch MacBook Pro via a custom Polyurethane foam interior as well as an interior egg-crate-style convoluted foam the lid.

Like golf? Want a simulator that absolutely kicks ass? Got $55,000? Well, to quote Meatloaf, “Two out of three ain’t bad”. But if you do have 55 grand to burn, you might want to pick up this golf simulator called Full Swing Golf. Oh, you’ll also need a spare 20 x 13 x 10.5 foot room to park it in.

Once you’ve overcome those hurdles, you can practice your golfing skills from the comfort of your own home. The huge screen is actually powered by a windows based PC which will let you play on golf courses from around the world at the touch of a button. The picture is projected on the large screen and you basically hit balls onto it. Two 360 degree curtains of infra-red beams emit 60000 pulses per second and will track the trajectory, speed and other details of the ball. Check out a video after the jump.

BenQ is coming to market soon with a stylish, slim new eight-megapixel digital camera. The new BenQ DC X-835 does not has yet have specific pricing or availability information.

The BenQ DC X-835 is fairly thin, measuring 12.5mm. In this camera is packed a Pentax 3x zoom lens, 2.5-inch display and a high sensitivity of up to ISO 6400 on movie mode and ISO 2000 in shooting mode. In movie mode you can also capture MPEG-4 movies in VGA 640 x 480 pixels (30fps).

The HP iPAQ rx5900 Travel Companion will help you navigate, stay connected, stay informed, and always be entertained wherever your travels may take you. Thin and light, this iPAQ is truly small enough to take with you wherever you travel.

The Travel Companion is a complete GPS navigation system that includes a car kit and TomTom Navigator 6 pre-installed. The navigation software has complete maps of United States and Canada. More than just a GPS, the device will also give you the current time and weather for cities worldwide, convert currency, size and measurement, customize …

HP first introduced the hw6900 Mobile Messenger Series in February at the 3GSM show in Barcelona, Spain but delays prevented the communicator from shipping this summer. Now comes word from HP that the cellular-wireless handheld may finally ship after all.

The 6900 series models look very similar to previous Mobile Messenger offerings. This series features the same 240 x 240 resolution, 64k color display, and a QWERTY thumb-styled keyboard. The big difference in this series is the four types of wireless networking: cellular, GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. This combination is still not …