Whenever IT engineer Alan Aw is on the road, the Internet is never far away.

While busy executives typically rush back to the office to check e-mail, the
32-year-old simply pulls over to the side of the road, taps on the 7-inch LCD
screen in the car's head-unit and voila - he's got mail.

Most music lovers would stick their iPod into their iPod-enabled head-unit to
take their music with them. But Mr Aw simply makes a few deft presses with his
forefinger, and his entire music and movie library - hundreds of titles there -
is presented buffet-style for his consumption.

"With all my music in my car, I don't need to think about which CDs to bring
along or manage messy playlists," said Mr Aw.

And when he shifts into reverse gear, a car sensor beeps to tell him how near
he is to kissing the wall. He gets a full view of what is happening behind his
car on his LCD screen, via a tiny camera.

What is the tech gadgetry at work here? A $2,800 computer in his car.

Not a half-baked, stripped down PC wannabe, mind you. But a full-fledged one,
complete with a 7-inch LCD touch screen, 600MHz ultra-low-voltage Intel
processor, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard disk drive and five USB ports.

And it runs on the same Windows XP found on desktop and laptop PCs.

The mini-car computer, or "carputer" as it is called, is loaded with the
Roadrunner carputer multimedia software on which Mr Aw can easily access his
music, videos, e-mail, Web, GPS, plus local traffic and weather information
from a single touch-screen interface.

It is customised to fit directly into the head-unit space of the car, so you do
not have to hide it under your seat or leave it sitting on your floorboard.

The carputer is connected to the Internet via a Linksys router fitted with an
M1 3G SIM card located in the boot. And because the router is also a Wi-Fi
access point, his friends can also surf the Net on their smartphones or laptops
when they catch a ride.

Carputers are popular in the United States and in Europe, but in Singapore,
they are still in their infancy. There are only a handful of auto shops selling
carputers in Singapore, with an entry-level system starting from about $2,300.

Mr Samuel Tan, 33, owner of car workshop Lifetron, which installed Mr Aw's
carputer, has been selling, on average, two units of his Windows XP carputers
every month since he started the business in April this year.

All of his customers so far are tech-savvy professionals in their 20s and 30s.
Of the wonder of the carputer, he said: "It is designed for the car environment
and yet it functions just like your desktop PC. You can even add your own mouse
and keyboard, GPS, Bluetooth, and connect to your onboard diagnostics systems
to view your fuel pressure and temperature readings on the LCD screen."

Mr Tan buys the barebone carputers and customises the parts to meet the
individual customer's needs. So you can ask for more RAM or a bigger hard disk.

In the past, enthusiasts would muck around with tiny desktops like the Mac
mini, but the PCs would not fit into the head-unit space. Heat management and
stability in a moving vehicle were also issues.

Mr C.L. Lee, 28, a product manager, is one such enthusiast who placed a Mac
mini and 3G router under his car seat last year. He would copy all his songs
and videos into a portable USB hard disk drive from his home PC, then plug the
drive into his car's Mac mini to transfer the files.

Mr Tan added that the carputers are specially designed with built-in power
regulators and shock absorbers, plus heat dissipation tools that fit in a car.

There is a scaled-down version of the carputer called the multimedia player,
which starts from $999. This is essentially also a mini computer, but lacks a
hard disk drive and a full-fledged operating system like Windows XP.

Homegrown Innovasia Technology, for instance, carries its own Smart-I brand of
multimedia players that run on the Windows CE operating system and data needs
to be read off SD cards and portable USB drives instead. These devices can play
DVDs, digital audio and video files and even have an option for GPS and a
rear-view camera attachment.

Sales have also been good.

Mr Ivan Goh, general manager of Innovasia Technology, said: "We started about a
year ago selling DVD players and moved on to multimedia players. Today, our
sales are 10 times what they were in our first month of operations.

"We sell about 20 DVD and multimedia players every day, and currently, 40 per
cent of them are multimedia players."

Innovasia is now working on a full-fledged carputer and expects to launch it
next year.

One of the leading parallel importers here, CarTimes, now offers the Smart-I
multimedia player with a rear-view camera plus sensors. The GPS add-on costs
extra.

Mr Alex Chew, sales consultant at CarTimes, said: "Out of 10 customers, eight
to nine will ask for a DVD player and two to three will ask for GPS," said Mr
Chew.