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Slashgear: I’ve a shudder-inducing feeling that my own personal purgatory will be a nightmarish bombardment of acronyms and abbreviations.  Seriously, is there any other industry so in love with initials and oddly-constructed names?  Well, the latest to offend my eyes is USBTV, basically a USB memory stick with built-in video encoder and video line-out.

Tech-shy users slap the key into their PC, drag’n’drop a load of content onto it (which get DRM-encrypted as it transfers) and then either slot it into an LCD or Plasma TV which has a compatible USBTV USB port, or use the cradle and a bog-standard video-out cable.

It might sound bland – and compared to wireless media streamers, it is – but it’s obviously caught the attention of LG, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer and Zoran who have all jumped into bed with Sandisk. Expect to see USBTV products later this year, after some trial testing starts at the beginning of February.

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TechDigest: Nokia has come up with a solution to allow you to charge your Nokia mobile phone from the USB port on your laptop or PC.

The Nokia CA-100 is compatible with the 2.0mm charger connector, whilst the CA-70 works with 3.5mm connectors.

Here’s the product page for the CA-100 though there’s no word on pricing.

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Electronista: Sony (…) unveiled a successor to its GT500 in-car CD receivers. Dubbed the GT610, the head unit is the first in the GT line to include a USB port.

The extension allows drivers to play AAC, MP3, or WMA tracks directly from an external flash or hard disk drive instead of recordable CDs. Audio quality for these heavily compressed music formats has also seen a boost, Sony says.

Much as with the Crystalizer hardware in Creative’s Xmod and other X-Fi devices, Sony’s BBE-MP processing can automatically find and restore the higher-frequency sounds that are typically lost when an MP3 is created. The company has also expanded the central LCD screen.

The GT610 is initially set to appear in Europe in January for an unspecified price and should also see an official launch in North America soon afterwards.

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Engadget: iPod car integration has long since gone from being mythic desire to nearly stock feature, but plugging an iPod in via USB and it works - that’s still a pretty fresh experience.

Alpine’s forthcoming iDA-X001 iPod / media-ready receiver promises just that having been “designed and developed with input from Apple.”

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Pocket-Lint: Kenwood showed six new car cd players at IFA 2006. All of them can connect to USB flash, hard drives or portable music players to access music in MP3, ACC or WMA formats. The 1-DIN models feature a USB cable connection on the rearside. The double height models both have the USB connection at the front.

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