This car has a touchscreen panel. That car has reduced emissions. This car has park assist. But do you know what they all lack? A little robot that’ll help you along your way, but that’s exactly what the BYD Qin brings to the highway.

On display at the Beijing Auto Show, the Qin is a plug-in hybrid car from Chinese automaker BYD. The car itself isn’t terribly exciting as far as sedans go, but there is a little pop-up robot on the dash that serves as a central control point. It’s almost like having R2-D2 on your X-Wing, except this one looks a little more like EVE from WALL-E and it sits on your dashboard.

By interacting with the bot via voice commands, you gain control over the wireless Internet, location services, music downloads, and even driver fatigue prevention. The bot apparently has built-in cameras to keep an eye on how you’re doing. All said, you get more of a human-like interaction with your car via this bot, rather than simply speaking into the empty space in your car. It’s not exactly novel to see more and more electronics shoved into our vehicles, but this could be among the several steps we’re taking toward having robot chaffeurs. After all, we already have self-driving cars.

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No typo here, the $79 Ainol Novo 7 Paladin is a camera-less tablet, but yes indeed, it runs Ice Cream Sandwich.  This tablet is a variation of the world’ s first ICS Android 4.0 tablet, the Ainol Novo 7 Basic we spotted last year. Ainol’s Novo 7 Paladin is certainly powered by a MIPS chip, and if it has the same internals as that Basic (minus cameras), then it might be MIPS32-based Xburst JZ4770 SoC by Beijing Ingenic Semiconductor company.  Knight Paladin mentioned there might be dual cameras still.

In short, this simple Paladin sports the same 800×480 non-IPS 7 inch capacitive screen, 512 MB of RAM, a miniUSB port, headphone jack, reset pinhole, volume rocker, microSD card slot, single tiny speaker on the back, and couple of additional “hardware” buttons that were banned from Android designs since Honeycomb.

This runs Android 4.0.1 on top of Linux kernel 3.0.8, a big step up from what Tegra 3 ICS tablets run on; 2.6.36 or so. “Basic” was quoted as being priced at $99, which explains their $79 “Paladin” price by missing optics.

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In an attempt to combat the problem, the Beijing Red Cross Foundation is giving out 20,000 GPS cell phone units to parents of primary- and secondary-school students. The watch-shaped phones are talk- and text-capable and, most importantly, allow parents to see where their children are at all times provided they’re wearing the device. Residents simply need to apply for the cellphone via the foundation’s website or offices. The cellphone costs 840 yuan (about $127) for two year’s worth of GPS and telecommunication services.

The initiative is starting in Beijing, but the foundation hopes to spread to other regions of China, such as Shenzhen, a city of 4,670,000 that sees some of the highest abduction rates per capita in the country. This is helpful in a way, but children exposed to cellular communications could face adverse side effects like thinning of the blood brain barrier.

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