Pioneer has a new, safer way for you to interact with parts your iPhone 4 while driving with the new AppRadio. The Pioneer AppRadio can be installed in any car to let you use your iPhone 4′s music library in the car with a 6-inch touchscreen. The AppRadio will interact with a small selection of more »

Japanese electronics giant Pioneer has filed suit against Garmin claiming the company is infringing on some of its patents that cover in car navigation technology. Pioneer has asked the International Trade Commission to block Garmin from importing the products that use the allegedly infringing technology. “Pioneer has been negotiating in good faith also with Garmin more »

When news falls through the cracks… wait, that’s “The Daily Show’s” bit. There’s lots of stories in the tech world and sometimes they get buried by Google, Microsoft, and Apple’s every move. Here’s a round up of stories that you may have missed. Pioneer wants to be in your car, Cisco wants to make splash with the business world, and OS X for everyone is coming.

Is the economy really forcing even TV to go down the drain? It’s apparently even hitting the big names. Former industry giant Pioneer has been seeing such a slump in sales that they are being forced to do massive employee cutbacks (10,000 more than they have already done) and even more shocking — are closing the doors to their TV making division come 2010.

They aren’t the only ones. Vizio, known for making lower cost televisions, has also been feeling the crunch. Although they used to make both plasma and LCD TVs, that will no longer be the case. Their web site does still offer some plasma models, but there were no new plasmas introduced at the recent CES, and according to the company’s co-founder Laynie Newsome, their plasma inventory is pretty much depleted.

Pioneer, in its efforts to continue their brand transformation, put this year’s product focus on their relationships within the audio/video industry. They just released a whole line of in-wall speakers to go along with their floor-standing models. These are designed to be mixed and matched to suit the needs of your home theater. I would say sit back and listen … but I guess you’ll just have to settle with some pictures.

Oh, and what is a Pioneer booth without some crazy tricked out cars with Pioneer car audio products? Check out three of those as well.

Quick Review

What is it?

• The Pioneer XMP3 (Model: GEX-XMP3) is a portable XM radio that costs $279.99

What’s cool:

• Wide variety of channels
• Superior sound quality when compared to FM radio
• Intuitive menus
• Simple design
• Recording and bookmark features

What’s not cool:

• Internal antenna is weak
• Poorly designed layout on remote control

The Crux:

• XM is to your radio what cable is to your TV. The service offers lots of very specialized channels and the sound quality is much better than your standard FM radio. Pair the XM Radio service with this portable XM unit and you’ve got a nice office or home radio provided you can get a signal.

Keep reading for a more in-depth review.

This is a guest post by Merlyn Akhtar. Merlyn Akhtar is a tech-savvy person who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty with hardware. One of the first upgrades she performed was installing a 2X CD-ROM drive in a PC in her early teens back when Prodigy was an awesome ISP.

Panasonic is already a sizable company, but they are going to get that little bit bigger with the confirmed takeover of Sanyo. Sanyo have been struggling recently, and it’s probably not a coincidence that their downturn coincides with the economic crisis that we are facing. Nevertheless, they are still worth a substantial $18.5 billion which will boost Panasonic’s value to around $107.8 billion, making it one of the biggest consumer electronics companies.

The reason behind this is that this takeover will give Panasonic access to two key technologies in the shape of solar panels and batteries which will help them greatly in their own hand-held electronic products, in fact, Sanyo is the market leader in the manufacture of rechargeable batteries. They will also acquire a company specializing in portable gadgets which generates $4 billion per annum in revenue. Continued after the break.

After Panasonic and Sony, it’s now Pioneer’s turn to announced their new Elite BDP-09FD Blu-ray player. And like the other new Blu-ray players, Pioneer would not just let the competitors outwit them in features and functionality. As such, Pioneer’s new Blu-ray player boast of advanced features as well that include 16-bit video engine, I/P conversion, video scaling, video adjustments of HD and SD content and QDEO processor and Renesas Technology’s video decoder. The result of all these technology? – a full 1080p video viewing pleasure with smoother picture free of artificial noise.

Other features of the BDP-09FD Blu ray player include Pioneer’s Adaptive Bit Length Expansion technology which enables the player to represent the purest color of the movies, BD movie restoration, 8-bit color production, dual HDMI 1.3a outputs and BD-Live support.

Pioneer’s new AVIC-N5 GPS is one of the top GPS’ currently available, as it comes with many notable features. One of the notable features includes something called TeleAtlasFind the Perfect Route. There are two DVD’s that store Tele Atlas’s giant database of maps, which allows the driver to let the system calculate the optimal route for your destination. These DVD’s also contain information of 12 million POI’s in the U.S. and Canada.

One of the reasons why this GPS is one of the top GPS’ currently available, is it’s screen size as it comes with a big 7 inch TFT touch screen. The AVIC-N5 even comes with something called multi-color illumination, allowing the driver to match the screen color with the dashboard of the car, only in the colors of red and blue, however. Another cool feature is the ability of the GPS to connect with an iPod. There is an optional cable called CD-I200 iPod Direct Control, which is easy way to control all of your songs/videos on your iPod.

Not even a month ago, Pioneer had announced that they had developed a 16 layer disk with 400 gigabytes of data storage. Totally amazing, right? Well, apparently those engineers at Pioneer don’t like to sit on their haunches, because they’ve just announced the development of a 500GB disk that includes extra encoding layers (I’ve read more »