A look at the winner of the "Over Land, Over Sea" category at CES: Pioneer’s AVIC-N2, and the two other finalists.

This being my 12th CES, you’d think I’d be jaded by now, but I’m not. It never ceases to amaze me how much I enjoy this work. For the last 8 years I’ve been the technology editor at Penthouse magazine and for the last 5 years I’ve had the honor of being a judge for “Best of CES”.  My judging partner Matt Bean of Men’s Health and I both wanted to be sure to cover all aspects of mobile electronics. Our category was “Over Land, Over Sea”--that is, anything that goes in a car, boat or RV.

The winner in our category was Pioneer’s AVIC-N2 ($2,500) aftermarket head unit. Yes it’s a GPS system/CD/DVD player with a great LCD display, but the truly kicking aspect of this unit is that it is the first of is kind to give real-time traffic info on the display map. You can see the flow of traffic (the green bars indicate traffic is moving over 50 mph) and if there are and accidents or construction delays you will see that, too! Now, with this type of information, GPS really means something to Americans. After all, most of us know where we’re going most of the time.

One of the finalists in this category was Ray Sat ($3495), which is a rooftop pancake-looking satellite receiver and sender. For the first time you can surf the Internet, send and receive e-mails and watch satellite television concurrently. This is a breakthough and a very important move forward for mobile communications.

The other finalist in this category was the Clifford AvantGuard 5.5X from Directed Electronics ($959), which takes a different approach to the keychain remote. The Directed uses a Dot-Matrix display which is really crisp and is head and shoulders better than any existing keychain displays on the market today. It has forty different screens and it is software driven to you can make changes--a whole lot better then the open-hood or truck display so commonly used. Another very cool feature is the remote starting ability. This is wonderful if you live in a northern climate to warm your car in the morning. The 5.5X keychain remote can send and receive signals up to a mile, which in itself is very cool.

For more information on the winners and finalists of the 2005 CES Awards, check out the CES site.