CES: Kia’s New UVO Powered By Microsoft

Around the summer, Kia will start shipping a new stereo option on their existing 2010 model line. This new stereo will be powered by Microsoft’s Automotive division – the same thing that powers Ford Sync, only Kia has made some improvements.

The unit is being called “UVO” and is labeled as an in-car infotainment system. The first thing you’ll notice is the big bright screen that is fully touch enabled. This makes it very easy for displaying prompts and interacting with the unit and displaying images from the rear view camera. What you won’t notice right away are the tweaks that have been done to make pairing with your cell phone that much easier. It’s now a 1-step process and you’re up and running. Of course it supports external MP3 players, iPods, and Microsoft’s Zune (the first in car unit that fully supports the Zune – to my knowledge).

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CES: Dual Screens Coming to your Laptop

While at CES, I managed to gain access to the briefing rooms upstairs in the Microsoft booth.  Here, I found all sorts of hot new tech that was talked about but not put down on the show floor for general press to lay their greasy hands on. One of the cool things I found was a dual screen laptop from Onkyo Corporation – Model DX1007A5. This little wonder cam complete with two 10.1 inch wide screens running 1266×768 resolution. It also has an AMD Athlon Neo processor at 1.60 GHz, 2GB of memory, 320GB of hard drive storage, a 1.3 Megapixel camera, WiFi support for n/b/g standards and of course, Bluetooth. All of that, along with a 6 cell Li-ion battery is stuffed into this 1.8Kg package. Do I even need to mention that it’s running Windows 7?

It was hard to resist getting hands on with this machine.  When you open the lid of the laptop, the two screens are stacked, one in front and the other behind. You can then pull then apart, sliding one to the left and the other to the right. They move very easily and snap into place when extended.

There’s no word on when this would become available or how much it would cost. Or even if they plan to bring it to North America. Onkyo isn’t really known for their personal computers on this side of the world. It’s my guess that we won’t see this available around these parts. I sure hope I’m wrong.