Archive for February, 2006

After the Nuvi Blog, Garmin, the GPS manufacturer, has created another blog. I guess they realised that blogs is a great way to communicate with current and prospective costumers. According to Garmin this blog will be

a fun way to hear about company news, customer feedback and stories, trade show dispatches, “how-to’s,” contests, and maybe a few surprises along the way.

I hope that this blog will provide useful information and not just turn to one single ad.

Visit Garmin’s Blog

Technorati Tags: garmin, blog, gps

MobileTechReview has published a review of the Asus MyPal A636, Asus Windows mobile pc with GPS capabilities and they report:

Convergence devices generally make concessions. For GPS enabled PDAs this means the PDA portion may be lacking in horsepower, a recent OS revision or wireless connections. The ASUS A636 is one of the first GPS Pocket PCs we’ve seen that rocks in both departments. The PDA portion’s features, power, performance and connectivity are top notch and the GPS hardware is excellent as are the maps. For the price, you’re getting an excellent machine, that lacks only in the looks department.

Technorati Tags: gps, asus, mypal, a636, review

Medion is planing the launch of a new GPS device, the GoPal PNA 350. The PNA 350 will be the successor of last year’s 220T. The unit, will be powered by a Samsung 266MHz processor and will feature a 256MB memory card, an integrated GPS receiver, a 65k colour TFT touch screen and two high definition speakers. Navteq is the company supplying the map software for the PNA 350, and the maps of UK and Ireland maps will be preloaded to the device.

The GoPAL PNA 350 offers a free lifetime subscription to Traffic Message Channel (TMC), which uses FM to provide you with minute-by-minute information about traffic problems.
The unit will be available from March with a price of just under £300.

Via TechDigest

Technorati Tags: gps, receiver, auto, medion, gopal, 350, pna

Engadget has announced the winners of their GPS Device or Application of the Year awards. The winning device, selected by the Engadget team is the popular TomTom GO 700. Google earth on the other hand was the readers choice. Personally I voted for the TomTom 700.

Head over to Engadget to see all the winners of the 2005 Engadget Awards

SiRF Technologies has announced that they will showcase a wide variety of key new GPS products and its first multifunction offering at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. Besides, SiRFInstantFix and SiRFLink that we have already talked about, they are going to showcase the SiRFstarIII-LT and the GSCi-5000.

SiRFstarIII-LT

SiRFstarIII-LT is the most power-efficient and smallest, manifestation yet of SiRF’s flagship SiRFstarIII architecture. SiRFstarIII-LT family of products packs the performance punch of the award-winning SiRFstarIII architecture while cutting power consumption into half compared to existing SiRFstarIII family of products. Available in two compact packages - 30 to 50 percent smaller than current SiRFstarIII offerings, these are an ideal choice for ever smaller, slimmer portable handheld devices that require leading edge performance with extremely low power consumption.

GSCi-5000

Optimized for the space and cost constraints of cellular handsets, the GSCi-5000 architecture represents an extremely small multimode A-GPS platform for easy integration into mobile phones. GSCi-5000 enables manufacturers to add high performance GPS functionality to new and existing handset platforms with minimal size, cost and integration effort.

Technorati Tags: gps, sirf, GSCi-5000, SiRFstarIII-LT, SiRFLink, SiRFInstantFix

Bones in Motion introduced it’s “Bim Active” fitness tracking, mobile service at DEMO 2006, a showcase for new technology products. BiM Active turns your cell phone into a fitness and location monitor for running, cycling, walking or any outdoor activity using built-in GPS. You can track your speed, your route, the distance you have covered and the calories you have burnt. You can also set goals and BiM active will report on your percentage attained at the end of the activity. Continue Reading »

Suunto is a wristwatch created for outdoor sports enthusiasts. It is equipped with GPS, a compass, chronograph, altimeter, and barometer. The Digital Lifestyle Magazine reviews the Suunto X9i GPS enabled watch and reports:

With the Suunto X9i, you’ll be able to have several key instruments right on your wrist. This unit, ideal for outdoor sports enthusiasts, integrates a clock and chronometer, GPS, Altimeter, Barometer, and Digital Compass in one tight package. Even better, the instruments are integrated to take the guess work out of common tasks by cross checking data internally.

Read the whole review at DLMag

The Magellan Roadmate 800 is a portable auto GPS receiver with multimedia capabilities, including an MP3 / WMA music player and a photo viewer. The flagship of Magellan’s Roadmate line was reviewed by Personal Computer World. The editors of PCW report

The Roadmate 800 looks very similar to Magellan’s previous systems – a chunky grey slab with a large (3.5in) colour touch-screen on the left and a series of buttons arranged in a circle on the right.

The difference with this particular Roadmate is that it has its own hard drive. We’ve seen hard disk-based GPS devices before, but this piece of kit has a whole 20GB - 5GB of which is available to store pictures or music.

Read the whole review here

Technorati Tags: gps, magellan, roadmate, 800, review

LAPD in an effort to limit the number of high speed chases in the Los Angeles are is going to test a GPS dart system. The police cars will be equipped with an air gun fitted to the radiator, that will fire a dart equipped with a Global Positioning System that will stick to the suspect vehicle. That will eliminate the need of high speed pursuits, since the police will be able to monitor the cars location. A small number of cars will be equipped with the system at first in order to test it’s effectiveness in real world situations. Although it seems like an excellent idea, I am not sure if the test will be successful, since the dart according to the reports has a range of just 20 metres.

Technorati Tags: gps, darts, lapd

We have recently mentioned the I-mate PDA-N, now CNET has published a review about it and writes.

Although I-mate is better known for its smart phones in the United States, the company calls itself “specialists in Windows Mobile device solutions,” and that includes PDAs. Hence, the I-mate PDA-N. The handheld runs the latest Windows Mobile 5 operating system and includes many of the features found on other PDAs today, but it also throws in some extra tricks, such as GPS navigation and VoIP support

Read the whole review here