Autonet Mobile now serving up music, movies, and games
By Nilay Patel 
posted Jan 3rd 2008 2:02AM
posted Jan 3rd 2008 2:02AM
The press release is pretty low on facts, but Autonet Mobile, the quirky car-centric ISP / EV-DO MNVO, has just announced that it will now allow customers to download music, movies and games to its routers and access them from any WiFi device. Of course, Autonet's EV-DO / WiFi routers don't have any built-in storage that we know of, so it looks like you're pretty much just downloading all this stuff to your laptop -- which isn't exactly press release-worthy, so we're assuming they forget to mention something that would actually make this interesting, like a content partnership or network storage. It's either that or CES PR fever is starting to hit a couple days early, but we'll optimistically read "passengers can access their personalized stored content via the unit's simple user interface" as meaning something substantial -- at least until we see this thing in action next week.
$10.95/day???? HOLY MOTHER F'ER! That's highway robbery! (literally)
Get a cradlepoint personal hotspot, or mobile router (either one), a sprint USB EVDO modem, and you can do it for $60/mo ($2/day).
$10.95/day is f'n INSANE.
There was an ad yesterday on Engadget about this. It was from Avis. Seems they partnered up with this company to offer this service at some major airports, like San Francisco and Miami.
I couldn't understand the press release either so I went and checked this out at the show this week. Basically they've added 32G of storage to the box that you can copy whatever you want to. They were showing a DVR program that would automatically download TV shows you had recorded to your car. It was pretty frigging cool. When I told them that 32G wasn't really enough space they explained that you could plug additional USB drives into the router.
They sold me, but apparently you can only get it at California car dealers right now and won't be available in Detroit for "a couple of months". How come California always gets everything first?