Saturday, April 7, 2007 - Alpine unveiled two new products at this year's Consumer Electronics Show that work great separately and together.

First, they showed me the next generation of their Blackbird portable GPS navigation system, the PMB-200.  Like Alpine's current PMB-100, the 200 is the only portable navigation system with a built-in traffic receiver.  You pay a yearly subscription fee to get real time traffic updates through your Blackbird.  It's available in 42 cities around the country, but not yet in El Paso.  Alpine's Scott Neill explained how it works.

"If it's busy for example if it's all yellow that would mean from 10 to 45 miles per hour," Neill said.  "If you see red beside your road it means it's going 10 miles per hour or less, so you might want to detour around it."

The PMB-200 is also equipped with Bluetooth, so if you have a Bluetooth cell phone, you can actually make and receive calls hands free through the Blackbird.  The Blackbird's car cradle has a built-in FM transmitter which will let you hear the caller through your car's stereo.

Neill also showed me a concept they call "Dock and Roll".  Alpine combined the Blackbird with Alpine's IVA-W205 head unit, so you get navigation and entertainment all in one.  The Blackbird "hides" behind the face plate of the W205.

"Instead of having the remotely mounted portable navigation device," said Neill, "it's now built inside of the unit. All we do is hit eject...you'll see the different options, we'll eject the Blackbird. The screen will open and you can see the Blackbird residing inside the double-DIN head unit."

Another nice feature of this Dock and Roll idea...if you're playing music while you're using the Blackbird to get somewhere, the music's volume automatically decreases when the Blackbird's "voice" gives you directions.  Then the volume returns to the regular level.

Both of these products will be in stores soon.  Find out more at Alpine's website - http://www.alpine-usa.com/US-en/