Directions, tunes and traffic warnings
With Garmin’s Nuvi 660 Personal Travel Assistant, you may never get lost again. Equipped with a 4.3-inch touch-screen, a Global Positioning System navigator, a microphone and an FM transmitter, the device can display your location, provide turn-by-turn voice directions and let you know when you’re about to enter a school zone requiring a slower speed. Plus, it can warn of upcoming traffic and construction delays and suggest an alternate route. When you know the way, it can play MP3 tunes and audio books, and handle calls made on a Bluetooth-enabled phone. The portable device costs $1,080. A 15-month subscription to the Total Traffic Network service is $60.
www.garmin.com
Gigs of media, to go
You can watch movies on the go with Toshiba’s new Gigabeat portable media player.
Loaded with a 3.5-inch color screen, 30 gigabytes of memory, a built-in speaker and a rechargeable battery, the MEV30K V Series model delivers eight hours of video playback. It also can play digital tunes and display photos downloaded from your PC or camera.
The compact device works with PlaysForSure subscription-based video services and supports the Windows Media Player 10 format. It will go on sale this fall for $400.
www.toshiba.com, www.gigabeat.com
A social kind of MP3
Samsung’s K5 Digital Audio Player lets you have your music both ways. When you crave solitude, you can listen to tunes through its ear buds. When you want to share your tunes, you can blast music through its two slide-out speakers. The portable gadget also features an FM radio tuner and a 1.7-inch color screen that can display digital photos. A 2-gigabyte model costs $210 while a 4GB version is $260.
www.samsung.com
Watch those TDs in HD on a big LCD
If the football season has you hankering for a high-definition TV, take a look at Sharp’s new Aquos wide-screen LCD models. Both the 46-inch LC-46D62U and the 52-inch LC-52D62U models boast an eye-popping resolution of 1,920-by-1,080 pixels. Thanks to a faster pixel response time and improved technology, the sets provide sharper fast-action scenes and deeper blacks and richer reds from most anywhere in the room. Encased in a black cabinet with bottom-mounted speakers, the sleek TVs can be placed on their stands or mounted on the wall. Available in October, the 52-inch model will cost $4,800 while the 46-inch one will go for $3,500.
www.sharpusa.com
