Love them or hate them, Apple is one of the most dominant players all over the world world with their iPad and iPhone devices. And now they’re looking to expand that dominance into a new place: your car.

That’s right, today Apple announced a new way to integrate iOS7 devices with your future vehicle. It’s called CarPlay and, to be honest, it looks pretty darn cool.

Set to debut later this year in vehicles from select manufacturers, CarPlay will let users make and receive calls, send and receive messages, listen to music and navigate with Maps, all via a built-in display in the car. Several other apps will be supported at launch, including Podcasts, Beats Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio and Stitcher.

Car companies such as Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo will showcase CarPlay at next week’s Geneva International Motor Show. Meanwhile, others such as BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia, Mitsubishi, Nissan, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota intend to make future vehicles compatible with CarPLay.

For more on how it will work, Volvo has released a video highlights CarPlay’s features. Check it out after the break.

Say what you will about the relative merits of a franchise like Fast and the Furious (we have), but one thing it does have going for it is cool car chases and other vehicle-related action. It also features Paul Walker.

There’s also another movie hitting theaters soon featuring Walker and cars, but it isn’t part of the Fast and Furious franchise. It’s called Vehicle 19.

In it Walker plays a recent parolee who picks up the wrong rental car after a long flight. He soon realizes he’s the target of an entire police force after discovering the tied-up female “passenger” in the trunk.

In addition to Walker, the movie stars Naima McLean, Gys de Villiers, Leyla Haidarian, and Tshepo Maseko. And no, Vin Diesel is nowhere in sight.

Check out the trailer for Vehicle 19 after the break. Look for it to arrive later this year.

The Fast and the Furious franchise has recently risen from the grave and reinvented itself as a pretty great action franchise. The success of Fast Five has given the filmmakers the conifdence to ramp up the scope and size of the next film. So much so that it looks like it might end up being two films.
The Hollywood Reporter recently talked to series star Vin Diesel who had this to say:

“A coda at the end of [Fast Five] teases the return of a character played by Eva Mendes last seen in 2 Fast 2 Furious as well as the return of Michelle Rodriguez.vWe have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages,” Diesel explained. “The studio said, ‘You can’t fit all that story in one damn movie!’”

Diesel did not reveal details on whether the two movies would be two-parters or two standalone movies.” The Fast movies are always a lot of fun and you can tell with the last installment that the film makers were enjoying playing with the universe they created.

The next film or films in the franchise are going to be highly anticipated and the franchise is healthier now then it has ever been.

If there’s two things that go together well it’s cars and movies. In fact, there’s a fine history of great cars in great (and not so great) movies over the years.

So it should come as no surprise that the most popular car show of all time, Top Gear, has decided to make a movie about cars, involving cars and shoot it on film. That’s just what Top Gear at the Movies is and as you would expect, it’s pretty awesome.

We’ve got the trailer for it to share with you today. In said trailer you can experience lots of car action, explosions and all the other things that go into a proper movie. Well, at least as close as this gets to a proper movie.

Still, it’s great fun. Check out the trailer after the break. Top Gear at the Movies is available on November 14th.

It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this site but in addition to movies, TV, comics, tech, games and all things geek, we also love cars. So, when we can combine two of our loves, like TV and cars, we are, of course, even more ecstatic.

You can probably guess, then, how we feel about a little BBC TV show called Top Gear. That’s right, we love it. With that in mind, then, how do we feel about the US version of Top Gear which airs on the History Channel and is hosted by comedian and car buff Adam Ferrara, champion rally and drift racer Tanner Foust and racing analyst Rutledge Wood?

Well, um, it’s complicated.

We tried to like it. Really, we did. We want to like it. We want it to succede because the world needs more fun, entertaining shows about cool cars on TV. Sadly, it just isn’t very good.

Let’s face it, Clarkson, May and Hammond are a tough act to follow and the US version has a long way to go. Still, we won’t give up on it just yet.

Neither will History Channel, it seems. Top Gear USA’s ratings for the second season improved greatly over the first to an average of 1.9 million viewers per episode. As a result of that increase, the network plans to extend the season with eight new episodes and is already in production on them at a secret location outside of Los Angeles, CA.

Ok, it’s actually in Irvine, but don’t tell anyone.

The new episodes are set to premiere in 2012 but as yet we don’t have a firm date. We’ll let you know when we do.