Hands on with Motorola's Wireless Wheels

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.