THE DIGITAL DRIVER.

This article evaluates several digital electronic gadgets for automobiles. Most global positioning system devices for cars store their maps on an internal hard drive such as the 5 gigabyte drive in Garmin's StreetPilot 2620 or the 10 gigabyte drive in Thales Navigation's Magellan RoadMate 700. The StreetPilot contains maps and points of interest for all of North America. The RoadMate 700 holds data for the 48 contiguous U.S. states and most Canadian cities. One can obtain a broader view of the road ahead using the 6.5-inch touch screen liquid crystal display that pops out of Pioneer's AVIC-N1 automatically. The device combines a digital video disc-based navigation system with digital video and audio playback and satellite radio. Several MP3 players for cars hold MP3 files on regular desktop or notebook hard drives. Alpine's HDA-5460 in-dash MP3 player contains a removable 16 megabyte hard drive. Another candidate, the PhatNoise Digital Car Audio System, stores recordings on an external hard-drive cartridge that shuttles from the PhatBox player in the trunk of a car to a cradle. The cradle connects the cartridge to the personal computer via a Universal Serial Bus 2.0. One can organize a music collection with the PhatNoise software, and then transfer the recordings to the cartridge.