By JULIO OJEDA-ZAPATA
Knight Ridder Newspapers

from kansascity.com


Think of Alex Huff's car as Windows on wheels. The Minneapolis man has outfitted his economy sedan with a full-featured personal computer that serves as his highway co-pilot.

It reads him his e-mail and the latest stories from The Wall Street Journal. It plays him Sarah McLachlan and "The Matrix." It finds him wireless Internet networks in the vicinity so he can surf the Web and get his latest messages. It even pinpoints his precise location using global positioning satellites so it can feed him driving directions.

In a move that Huff and business partner Truman Kellie hope will help spark an automotive revolution, they're marketing car-based computer systems that run a version of Microsoft's standard Windows operating system.

The computers, while still a bit clunky to use, are intended to revolutionize the driving experience by adapting the powerful capabilities of a desktop or laptop computer for those behind the wheel.

Huff and Kellie have had all of three takers so far, including Huff's father. Still, they're convinced car PCs are a consumer craze just waiting to happen, and they intend to be on the leading edge of the trend.

Their fledgling firm, Truman Mobile, has spent years researching the requirements for a PC user-friendly enough to be used without a keyboard (though a wireless one is available), yet rugged enough to work in a car.

Pop Huff's trunk and you'll find a cube-shaped computer unlike anything for sale at CompUSA. Its processor is heat-resistant for those sometimes scorching Twin Cities summers. Its hard drive resists cold during grueling Minnesota winters.

The PC runs the full-featured, industrial-strength Windows 2000, not a wimpy quasi-Windows such as Windows CE, which Microsoft and Clarion tried to incorporate into a failed AutoPC system in the late 1990s.

Plop into the driver's seat and push buttons on the dashboard. One turns on the PC in the trunk. The other causes a small flat-panel screen to emerge from a slot and flatten itself against the dash.

The screen isn't a Truman Mobile invention, but an off-the-shelf component used in cars to display radio station information and other basic data. Huff calls it "the most underutilized technology I've ever seen."

In Huff's car, the Alpine screen displays the familiar Windows desktop, task bar, start button and the like.

Text is too small to read comfortably, but Truman Mobile has partially solved this problem with magnifying software and text-to-speech programs. Huff uses the latter to listen to his e-mail while he drives.

With flicks of a remote control, Huff can pull up music playlists, DVD movies and step-by-step driving directions, which he can have read to him.

Huff also makes heavy use of the computer's 802.11b, or "Wi-Fi," wireless networking capabilities, which allow him to detect and piggyback on nearby wireless networks as he travels. When he finds a suitable network, he can pull over to hop on the Web or check his e-mail.

The wireless capabilities are in use even when Huff's car is parked outside his home. The car PC becomes part of his own Wi-Fi network, which includes five other PCs scattered throughout his residence near downtown Minneapolis. This allows Huff to easily transfer MP3 tunes and other files to and from the auto computer.

Huff will soon add another kind of wireless Internet access via mobile phone networks such as Sprint's PCS Vision or AT&T Wireless' mMode, allowing him to get online almost anywhere within a carrier's service area.

Kellie, the technical brains behind the Truman Mobile computers, says he was inspired by the computers in his home that automate everything from his TV and stereo to his answering machine and the file servers for his music and movies.

"I drew up some plans in about 2000 for a car system, but it wasn't quite there yet," Kellie said. "The hardware wasn't hardy or cheap enough for a consumer product."

Last year, crucial technology advances allowed Kellie to design and build a reasonably affordable computer that could take jostling and keep working at the temperature extremes often found in a car trunk.

Despite their specialized features, Truman Mobile systems start at only about $1,600.

Yet Truman Mobile has had little luck so far luring buyers or convincing car-related stores to carry its computers. (The systems now are sold through the firm's Web site at www.trumanmobile.com.)

So a small band of Truman Mobile true believers luxuriate in the convenience and power they say their car computers give them. Huff's father, for instance, "isn't a computer guy," Alex Huff said, "but he loves this."

Kellie and Huff, who also run a technology consulting firm called Blueturtle, know further design work is needed to bring their car computers fully into the mainstream.

They await more PC industry breakthroughs, too. Voice recognition software that could be used to run their computers via speech commands remains too unreliable, they noted.

For now, Huff is content to listen instead of speak.

"It's awesome," he said. "Listening to the paper while driving to a meeting, that's huge."