When we tried to hunt down some info on
Motorola and Nikko's
Wireless
Wheels RC car yesterday, we were met with blank stares by reps from Freescale (which provides the toy's innards)
and Motorola (which announced its launch). Moto's booth reps actually sent us to their automotive audio experts once we
mentioned it was a car (we said
toy car, dudes). Fortunately, we fared a little better today, and were able to
catch the car at Freescale's booth, where it shared place of honor with a Robosapien 2 and other Freescale-powered
toys. As it turns out, the car isn't all that new, despite yesterday's announcement. At its heart, Wireless Wheels is
basically a new version of Nikko's existing Freescale-driven ZigBee wireless car. The main difference is an external
ZigBee dongle, which plugs into any Motorola iDen phone, turning the phone into a controller for the car. In fact,
Freescale was also showing off another version of the ZigBee dongle, which turns an iDen phone into a remote for a
home-automation system. That version lets you control lighting, audio, video and pretty much anything else that can be
hooked up to a home network. Unfortunately, it's just a concept product at this point, so if you've got an iDen phone
and want something to play with, you'll just have to stick with Wireless Wheels.
posted Jan 7th 2006 10:24PM
nice little birdcage. i want 1
It's cool that they used the ultra sexy Maserati Birdcage, a concept car that was fittingly a joint venture between Pininfarina and Motorola.
http://www.autoblog.com/2005/11/06/motorola-and-pininfarina-do-the-birdcage-concept-sema/
http://conceptcars.autoblog.com/2005/06/28/maserati-birdcage-may-get-green-light/
This is so totally akin to bending over and asking for a reach-around. Remote-controlled vehicle using a little-known and easily acquired frequency on IDEN? Why didn't they just put up a big sign that said "Welcome Department of Defense!"? Or did they?
f
Been there done that... Moto is a little late, Sony Erisson had bluetooth cars a while ago.