Moto, Nikko Team for Radio Controlled Car Phone

Online staff -- Electronic News, 1/6/2006

Checking e-mail and stock prices with your phone? That's so 2000.

Listening to MP3s and taking digital images? Puh-leeze, your kids have been doing that for ages now.

To have a truly avant-garde mobile phone, to really be one of the technerati, one must have one that can operate a remote controlled toy car, so you can listen to the digital squeal of racing tires. Motorola, Freescale and Nikko said at CES on Friday that they were teaming up for just such a phone.

Nikko is a Chinese maker of RC toys, and claims to be the largest in the world. At CES Moto and Nikko announced a new Wireless Wheels remote control toy car controlled by certain Motorola iDEN handsets. Based on the Freescale Semiconductor wireless personal area network (PAN) technology that utilizes the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.

Using the Motorola iDEN phone attachment, the handset replaces traditional remote controls by operating multiple devices such as toys or robots with two-way communications, according to the companies. Wireless Wheels are what the companies termed "full-function" radio controlled (RC) toy cars; combined with Motorola iDEN handsets, users can view simulations of their car's movement via animation on the phone's screen, hear the engine start and the tires squeal as they race, and feel the phone vibrate in their hand like the steering wheel of a race car, the companies said.

In addition, the push-to-talk button serves as a turbo boost for the car.

"This is the first major advancement in the RC toy category in many year," M. Ban, CEO of Nikko Company Ltd., said in a statement. "We are honored to be able to work with Motorola and Freescale on the development of the generation of hi-tech RC toys."

Wireless Wheels RC toy cars are compatible with the following Motorola iDEN phones: i265, i275, i560, i730, i760, i830, i850, i860, and i870; the cars operate on four AA batteries.