Gentlemen, we’re pleased to announce that Gear Patrol and The Truth About Cars are teaming up to bring you The Truth About Cars fiercely independent expert car reviews on Gear Patrol. We’ll be highlighting a new T.T.A.C. vehicle review on Gear Patrol every week. In time, you can also expect to see Gear Patrol auto gear (in car entertainment, navigation, audio, etc) reviews on The Truth About Cars.

What you will be getting: No-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners automotive reviews delivered to you by incendiary, witty and veracious writers. Essentially, a better understanding of what a fine automobile entails without any fat.

What you will not be getting: Watered-down, long-winded marketing babble coming from writers paid to write positive reviews because their advertising budgets depend on it.

I use used a 4th generation iPod. It was glorious with it’s 20 gigabyte hard drive, paper weight styling and ability to be dropped onto concrete with fear not for the device but for the ground it landed upon.

That is until I decided to introduce it to my venerable friend. You may know him well and by many names and origins, but I like simply like to call the old bastard, beer. Miraculously the only thing that didn’t work after that sad, but funny, but sad introduction was the screen. That’s when I cursed out loud a few times then decided to see if I could salvage the beast.

In my Google searches I came across Rapid Repair, an iPod service center. They claim that 85% of the iPods they fix are less than $90. Using a three step process: diagnostic order, sending in device, and repair. After 48 hours I was given a quote for $30. About $299.99 less than I expected (roughly the price for a new iPod).

Outstanding. Well, long story short the unit has worked beautifully, it’s sitting plugged into an iPod Dock in my bathroom dutifully carrying out it’s remaining days as the music source for my shower karaoke sessions. Punishment? I think not.

If you’re looking for an iPod, iPhone or Zune (really… do you have a Zune?) then look no further than Rapid Repair. They even offer some basic mods like colored screens.

Bradley’s full recap of the 2008 New York Auto Show coming soon, but we decided to share our slideshow ahead of the weekend. Enjoy.

Editor’s 5 Second Review: Show was great. Lots of vehicles to see. Spokesmodels were subpar. Fuel efficiency reigns king. Check back for Bradley’s review.

View Slideshow

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First of all, we should talk about what the Amazon Kindle does. The premise is simple. It’s a wireless device that uses a technology called electronic-paper’ that allows you to have thousands of books at your disposal ready to read on the high-resolution screen that looks and ‘reads’ like real paper. We’ll get to the ‘reads’ part in a moment.

The Kindle uses the Sprint high speed EVDO wireless network giving you unlimited and free access to the Kindle store practically anywhere. There were even times when we were receiving signals where other Sprint phones weren’t. Electronic versions of books will deliver to your Kindle at moments notice and the top newspapers have joined, including: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post as well as periodicals like TIME magazine and Forbes. Time will only tell who else joins the Kindle foray. Better yet, and this is where we particularly find interest - top blogs (over 300) like BoingBoing, TechCrunch and The Onion will deliver their updated content to the Kindle throughout the day as well as unfettered access to Wikipedia. For this writer, that would be enough to qualify purchasing the Kindle… IF it were say, $200 less. A practical and business savvy move for Sprint would be to subsidize costs of the Kindle for current Sprint subscribers, but we’ll leave Sprint’s less-than-wise business practices for another day.

The Kindle device itself isn’t too bad of a product for being first generation. We can only imagine what tweaks and upgrades the engineers are conjuring up now. Hopefully, comfort-in-hand-, improve intuitiveness of controls and e-mail are some of them. The battery life, under our usage averaged about two days with the wireless turned on all the time. With it off, we got almost 5 days in. Good, but not fantastic. Now about that electronic paper screen. Well, it looks bloody fantastic. Sharper so than even the Sony E-reader. The display is crisp and we found little fatigue reading it over time. Arguably though it’s hard to see why anything would be an improvement after looking at a monitor for a good part of the day.

Our time with the Kindle has provided us the ability to read a few of our favorite blogs*, newspapers and several guilty pleasure novels (Michael Crichton’s Prey is under appreciated, no matter how trite you may have thought it was). It does exactly what it touts and honestly it does it well. Only time will tell how this device will fare in the long run. There’s an incredible tangibility with books that I think this generation may have a hard time letting go, but as they (we) age, the prospect of carrying backbreaking books on a commute, vacation or even around the home may outweigh the proposition. Oh, and did we mention free wireless access to Wikipedia?

*notably missing are: Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Acquire, The Truth About Cars and… Gear Patrol

Don’t take our word for it? Fine. We won’t argue. Go read Michael Specter’s article on Men’s Vogue. It’s insightful and far more eloquent than ours.

Cost: $399 @ Amazon

Tags: Technology, Amazon, Kindle, Review