Productopia | On Location

The official start to the holiday shopping season -- Black Friday -- is rapidly approaching and stores are already starting to slash prices. At its recent CES Unveiled event, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) predicted a 3 percent decrease in spending from last year, based on their research. This is due to a number of reasons, including 53 percent of those polled in a recent CEA survey who say they are making less money than they were last year.

One of the fun parts of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is guessing which of the products introduced with great fanfare will actually make a go of things, and which ones will soon be relegated to the technology scrap heap. Tuesday's CES Unveiled media event more or less confirmed that some of the big trends that have been building over the past year -- such as sustainable technology, 3-D TV, the growth of apps, and others -- should be major presences at the 2010 CES in Las Vegas. But Tuesday's event was also the coming out party for the 2010 Best of Innovations award winners: products selected by a panel of experts as being the most innovative in terms of design and engineering. Some of these are already available, and the rest should reach the consumer market in the coming months. As always, we think some of these innovations look as if they'll be hits. Others? Not so much.

Call it the mobile, mobile office.

At a recent event in New York City, Ford demoed its in-dash computer, a mobile solution for contract workers whose office is their truck. The in-dash computer, part of Ford Work Solutions, enables owners to view and print documents, access their home computer and even surf the web and check email, without ever leaving the job site. (Literally - these features cannot be used while driving.) The in-dash PC is available optionally in Ford's 2009 F-150, F-Series Super Duty trucks and E-Series vans.

The in-dash PC, which runs the Windows CE 6.0 Operating System, has a 6.5-inch touch screen, 4 GB of onboard memory, an SD slot for added memory and a USB port. Bluetooth capable, the PC can be paired with the included wireless keyboard/mouse, an optional wireless printer and mobile phones for hands-free calls. High-speed internet access is provided by Sprint Mobile Broadband using the Opera Mobile browser. Its email program can sync web-based e-mail accounts.These features all come at a cost, outlined at the bottom of this post.