Tired of your kid poking the back of the driver’s seat on a long road trip? Soon you’ll be able to give your child in the back seat something else to poke at — an Android tablet embedded into a headrest. VizuaLogic already offers a line of headrest monitors designed to work with DVD or game consoles so that passengers can while away the hours by ignoring their surroundings. The company’s latest offering is a 7 inch tablet with a 1 GHz single core processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. It runs Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread and can handle games, video, web browsing over WiFi, or other tasks. The tablet has a capacitive touchscreen and front-facing ports for plugging in a headset, microSD card, or USB peripheral. There’s also a connector that lets you plug in a DVD player and an HDMI port. There will also be a remote control accessory. The VizuaLogic tablet t isn’t designed to be removed from the headrest, which is why the ports are all hanging out on the front. It also won’t be cheap. CNET reports that a pair of two headrests will run about $1400 when they launch in early 2012. When asked why Gingerbread was used rather than the newer and tablet-optimized Honeycomb (or Ice Cream Sandwich) versions of the Android OS, Vizualogic stated that the the unit would be updated to version 3.1 or better by the time it reaches production. However, I'm guessing that the real reason Gingerbread 2.3 was chosen was because the hardware specs aren't very impressive. A bank of physical buttons for home, menu, back, and power functions can be found below the touch screen, and a Wi-Fi connection (either through your paired mobile phone or a wireless hot spot) brings the Internet into the backseat for streaming audio, YouTube videos, Netflix, Skype, or whatever other apps you'd like to install. The unit should also ship with a wireless remote controller and possibly a pair of IR headphones.
SOURCE: Vizualogic shows off Android-powered headrest monitors | SEMA show - CNET Reviews
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