Dirt-cheap car tech for the masses

Besides connecting your cell phone, MP3 player or portable flash drive to your car, Sync allows you to talk to them. One of its most remarkable qualities is that it allows you to use your voice to control all - or at least most - of these devices and unlike a lot of other voice recognition systems, it's easy to use.

Say you have a thumb drive with several albums on it. Just plug it into the port in the car's center console. Then ask the car to play one or all the songs by a particular artist, or all the songs in a given genre.

You can do all this without having to do anything special beyond having the songs on your device. You don't have to train the system to recognize your voice, and all the data needed to organize and select the songs is contained within the MP3 files themselves.

Using a wireless Bluetooth connection, Sync can even play music stored on your cell phone without any physical connection to the car.

Sound quality isn't as good when playing music using Bluetooth, however, and you can't select specific songs using voice commands. You can only start and stop playback or skip ahead and back track by track. For the time being, you're still better off plugging in.