I saw a Samsung Ultra-Mobile PC at Fry's recently for under $1000 and wondered why aren't these things just built into cars dashboards or at least give a port and tether?
check it out
Is this my next 'PDA'?
Empegger thoughts?

Getting pretty close to dumping this setup. Streetdeck seems to be dead. Centrafuse looks interesting, going to try and see if the demo is decent after blasting the OS on the unit.

For months now, I have not had even a 50% success rate on resumes from standby or hibernate (not OS issues, just Streetdeck issues of freaking out waking up, causing its watchdog to eventually kick in). There is no clear development path on the software, and no sign of a stable, solid build. Every build I've tried, release and beta always has something wrong somewhere, enough to impact daily use.

The allure of a powerful indash system was there, one that could provide good media playback, navigation, and lots to tinker. Problem is, you have to tinker too much, and the media and navigation have never beaten my old setup of the empeg and Garmin GPS V.

Centrafuse is/was pretty good I think. Well it was back when I was playing with it a year or two ago. It doesn't look like too much has changed since then though.

I see they have 2.0 beta at the moment. Gestures are coming for one.

They have gone and renamed/repackaged it though which would tend to suggest sales weren't great.

I didn't really like the Navigation software they embed. It's "Destinator" (google it). I much prefer my TomTom (on my Nokia E61) but you can't get that for a PC that I'm aware of. It did work though.

Apart from that as a media player it worked reasonably well. It didn't require too much tinkering in terms of general use, but you might have to play a little with resume/hibernate stuff - nothing major though.

Most people have been focusing on the software - but what are the latest thoughts on the Infill hardware? Anything better out there now? Anyone have experience of the Infill E3?

The Infill E3 is probably not a good CarPC platform for the software out there. It's ARM based, flash memory, and ideal more for an embedded solution.

I'm actually pondering selling my Infill G4 at this point. No specific reason due to the hardware, but more to possibly look at some other system that would suit my car better. The Infill G4 is good if you are willing to let the onboard amp drive the speakers. But for me, I need an external or line out solution due to my built in subwoofers that came with the car. the Infill G4 + an external sound card just hasn't been all that reliable for radio use, and it's hurting the install a bit with having to dedicate a USB port to a sound card.

Not sure when I will pull it out, but let me know if your interested in buying it and I'll try to find out what a fair price is for it, especially considering your loss of the empeg.

I wonder if you could get rockbox to run on the G4. Or on the empeg for that matter.

Yes. Would be reasonably easy actually particularly given that the hardware is pretty well known. Still a fair bit of work though. When I helped with porting it to the Toshiba Gigabeat (which already ran Linux on an ARM9) I had the idea of running it as an application under Linux.

Instead they created it as a standalone application and it really does work well - so much better than the original rubbish that it came with. Rockbox is still missing some empeg features though.

Well, the end is approaching for my CarPC experience. My amplifier died a few weeks back, and thats going to be the final straw. The PC aspect has has quirks from day one, no matter what front end or version I try, and it's just getting old spending so much time tinkering to never improve the situation. I've probably flattened and reloaded the unit 7-8 times, trying to get a stable solution that hibernates properly. I've tried to add some useful features like bluetooth audio, only to have it add more headaches. Navigation is crap, and I'm tired of plopping down $100+ to try something new.

I'm now trying to decide how much longer I plan on keeping the existing car. If it's more then a year, I'll probably look to install my empeg, and a bluetooth audio receiver tied into the line in for podcasts. Any future vehicle is likely to have Ford Sync, something that at least seems to function.

Took me forever, but the CarPC is finally coming out of my Mustang on Tuesday. Been limping along with PC speakers connected into my iPhone for podcasts for the past many months.

I think the era for CarPCs is coming to a quick end. New cars offer really nice integration for media and nav features, and Ford Sync is even evolving to work with apps on smart phones. With the tablet market set to explode soon, I think most folks who still want a do it yourself route may just opt to put a Samsung Tab or similar device in their dash. Maybe we will see companies like Centrafuse move to Android, but it's hard to say. Even with this being an enthusiasts only market, it really feels like it's in decline over the past few years.

It was an interesting experience overall, but if I could do it all over again, I'd skip the hassle of it all. The hardware was looking promising with systems like the G4, but software never caught up.

I'd be interested in pim's experiences, to see what he has done at this point. Sadly he's not very active these days.

It's been a waste of time and money.
I gave up on Streetdeck and RoadRunner. I never bothered to try Centrafuse.

I'm still using my Empeg and I bought a Mio Moov S568 to do my nav.
My next car will probably not have a DIN slot at all...

Pim

Mmmmm... I'm just looking to implement something on my new(er) E46 M3. I'm going down the CarPC route. The existing OEM Nav works very well although the maps available lag by about a year in Australia. So really I'm looking for a media player only and maybe a few other smaller things. Not really looking into DVB-T, or DAB+ just yet.

Using the existing Nav screen limits options since it's only 400x240 and has no touch screen (basic technology is about 15 years old). I'm not real keen on ripping it out and replacing it. There is a drop in Chinese head unit but I'm not convinced about the integration and quality of it.

I've been playing with media frontends on my laptop and they really are quite crap in general. There are some BMW looking basic ones (Carmedia and CarX). SD seems pretty average in my evaluation. XBMC is probably the best contender but I'd need to create a skin from scratch since it's aimed more at HD TVs with small fonts (on big TVs). Uses stacks of CPU too. Centrafuse doesn't really play well with the existing controls (and no touch screen) kind of ruling it out.

Others like RoadRunner (now RideRunner), mediaengine, openmedia are really bad. Simple stuff the equivalent of tab order are all over the place. Bad configuration and generally just amateur software (which in most cases they are). Even XBMC fails at skipping to the next song. It stops the audio to skip and then when it starts the next song, you hear a bit left in a buffer from the previous song. Ugh. Could be drivers but Winamp, WMP etc have no problem at all.

I did come back to think how I could integrate an empeg into a CarPC. Seems a bit silly to have to do it like that but not out of the question. Or somehow emulate the empeg hardware even to run the player app (if only the source didn't go into a virtual blackhole of company acquisitions). Edit: Obviously this isn't happening ever but that's where the thought process ends up...