While Windows CE is in the news this week as a result of Microsoft's pocket PC marketing push, the mini operating system has another potentially huge target market that always appears to be on the back burner � the in car PC.

Every few months or so for the last few years, someone from a company like Ford, GM, Intel, IBM and Microsoft has stood up and done a visionary presentation about how groovy it will be when we all have computers in our cars. Then it all goes quiet for another six months. The most recent was Ford CEO Jacques Nasser who told USA Today in January: "We will do nothing short of transforming our cars and our trucks into portals for the Internet"

In car computing is one of those just over the horizon ideas that never seem to actually arrive. Of course, we've all had computers in our cars for years, looking after engine management, antilock brakes and performing diagnostics. A few rather tragic experiments with talking cars that told you when you were going too fast (the one I'm thinking of was in an Austin Maestro, one of the worst cars ever made and which therefore very rarely went fast enough to trigger the warning)

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