I'm waiting patiently for my Honda Civic Hybrid with Navi in Magnetic Pearl to arrive on Jan 1st. I've been thinking about the "audio card reader" feature of the navi model. From what I've read, its simply a pcmcia slot that you can put a pcmcia card reader into.

It makes me wonder what other things you might put into that slot. Since it is expecting just a dumb reader there, it is probably just looking for a file system. If this is the case, could you put a hard drive there? You can get a Toshiba 5 GB PCMCIA hard drive off of ebay from $30-$80. It would be nice to have 5GB of music sitting in your car, especially if it was built into the existing user interface. Does anyone have experience with the audio card reader?

Also, this got me thinking further that a pcmcia card that had a usb host could be extremely useful. Plug your phone/pmp/mp3 player into the usb slot in the pcmcia card, and voila! You've mounted the filesystem. The biggest hurdle I see is that the pcmcia card would have to have enough smarts to mount the usb device as a mass storage device without using any drivers. It would have to just look like a file system from the navi side of the connection. I've checked around, and this sort of device doesn't exist. However, I've designed both USB and PCMCIA interfaces before, and this would not be very hard of a product to bang out.

Finally, what about that ipod connector? Is that basically a firewire host with some driver at the end to mount the ipod? I wonder if it could be adapted to other devices? A firewire to USB converter might work... Then again, Apple is proprietary enough that it probably wouldn't.

Anyhow, the possibilities of integration with gadgets here is huge!

--Brad