Parrot is launching their new car stereo receive which has strayed away from the trend of all touch screen interface.  The Asteroid is a Google Android based receiver with loads of features and functionality.

The receiver still has a graphical interface to display the content being played, but the navigation is all “old school” buttons and radial dial.

What is most interesting about the new Parrot receive is the many number of USB ports located on the back side.  With the four USB ports the Asteroid gives the user plenty of options.

Of course you’ll get the expected RCA jacks for hooking up your car’s stereo system and a 3.5 mm jack for connecting your MP3 player.  The Asteroid has three high speed USB ports and one 1.1

Every tech guy I know anxiously awaits the CES trade show at the start of each year.  I think it’s the only help for getting us through the vacation blues after a long Christmas break.  I’ve seen a bunch of news about USB 3.0 gear from CES 2011.  Many of them are USB hard drives and here are the most recent five we’ve read about.

Buffalo

Buffalo launches a complete line of USB 3.0 storage devices.  The DriveStation Quad USB 3.0 is a four drive, high speed RAID enabled storage solution offering transfer speeds up to 235 MB/s, twice as fast as USB 2.0. Equipped with four hard drives configured in RAID 5, DriveStation Quad USB 3.0 also supports RAID 0, 10 and JBOD modes for flexibility between data redundancy and available storage capacity

Seagate

Seagate introduces some new ‘super slim’ USB 3.0 hard drives.  Seagate’s new ultra-portable GoFlex drive comes in a metal case that’s only 9 millimeters thick, which Seagate says is a full 38% thinner than their previous generation. This is made possible by some 7 millimeter thick 2.5″ drives that still manage to deliver 7200 rpm performance via USB power, and you get a solid 340 gigs for

We hope you find many USB gadgets in your stockings or under the Christmas tree. Merry Christmas to all our readers, bloggers and fellow gadget lovers.

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Samsung is looking to put a new twist to the classic digital camera with multiple USB ports.  The idea is simple, once a picture is taken, the folks in the picture can turn over their thumb drives for a quick download of the picture just taken.

Not a bad idea considering most of us now have USB sticks in our pocket, car or computer bag.  I think the wifi SD card is a bit better of an idea, but this too will work.

The concept camera from Samsung has three female USB ports to accept mass storage devices [tech term for USB stick] and a male USB for connecting to a computer for downloading.

Bradley Manning was able to download over a quarter million documents from the US government via USB slurping…where by, he downloaded the sensitive data directly to his flash drive, then sent the docs to Wikileaks.

Not a cool move Private Manning.

So as a result, the US Military is banning all USB flash drives with systems connected to, or have access to, the SIPRNET network.  The Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, in simple terms, the internet used bye the DOD.  Of course it’s much more sophisticated then your office network with internet access.

The US Government has taken this breach of information so seriously that any military who do not comply with the data transfer ban “may be punished under Article 92 of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.” The article covers failure to obey orders and dereliction of duty and makes clear that any persons in violation of such rules “shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

Like I said, not a cool move Manning.

If you haven’t noticed, Red Box Movie rental kiosks have popped up all over the place.  Most notably are the Red Box’ at the grocery store, which makes perfect sense, you’re going to the store anyway, why not put a movie rental at check-out.

Flix-on-Stix is looking to do the same thing, only difference is the Flix On Stix is renting your beloved movie on USB.  The concept is simple, yet peppered with problems.  Lets cover the concept first…the idea is having a user insert their USB drive into the Flix on Stix kiosk and download a movie.  Great idea…simple, convenient and assuming cheap.

Look just one step deeper and you start asking yourself about transfer times.  The Flix-on-Stix is USB 3.0 enabled, but SuperSpeed flash drives have just ‘barely’ come to market, most will have USB 2.0.  So to download a low quality video will take at least 10 minutes.  Next, what kind of DRM does Flix on Stix use?  We know our USB and their is no universal USB copy protection that will work on PCs, Macs and set-top boxes…so how & where will these movies play?  The last bit is the type of movies to be offered…we know studios wont sign off on DRM that isn’t proven by CDSA [http://www.cdsaonline.org/] so after all this, I’m not sure where Flix On Stix leaves us.  What do you think?

PQI introduced their first SuperSpeed USB 3.0 flash drive today, called the U339V.  The PQI 3.0 stick is available in 8GB through 64GB sizes.  As with any new technology, the performance is lagging behind the specification of performance.

For example the smaller 8GB PQI drive shows a read speed of 55MB/s and a write speed of 10MB/s.  Verse the larger 16GB and larger sizes are more like 86MB/s read speed and 20MB/s write speed.  If you know anything about flash drives, it just means the bigger sizes are dual channel and the 8GB is single channel.

Still far from the 5Gbps transfer rate USB 3.0 is suppose to offer, but once more advanced controllers come into the market, we’ll see the performance rise.

The PQI drive will be available through