Archive for February, 2006

Dual Electronics has announced two new GPS devices earlier last month at the CES, the XNAV3550 and the XNAV4300.
The XNAV3550 will have a 3.5″ TFT, LCD touch screen and will be preloaded with a seamless map of the United States with almost 2.000.000 POI. This new device will be easily upgradeable with additional maps and information through an included 1 GB SD memory card that can also be used to store media files, such as mp3.

The XNAV4300 GPS will have a larger touch screen (4,3 inches). Like it’s little brother the XNAV3550, it will be preloaded with a seamless map of the United States, plus search and guidance functions. In addition to its comprehensive search and viewing options, and turn-by-turn guidance with voice and visual indicators, the unit also features a built-in speaker and MP3 playback capability.

Both GPS devices are expected to sta shipping in the second quarter of 2006

Technorati Tags: GPS, duel, xnav4300, xnav3550

Navicore, a company based in UK has released Navicore Personal 2006/1, a product that promises to turn your cell phone into a full featured GPS device. Navicore personal comes in a memory card and all you have to do to insert it in the memory card slot of your cell phone. Navicore Personal gets the location information needed in navigation from an external Bluetooth GPS-receiver. When using Navicore Personal for the first time, you need to activate the GPS-receiver and pair it with Navicore Personal. Some of the feature a Navicore personal include:

3D and 2D view.

Clear map display. Navicore Personal displays the route on a digital map in full color and detail.

Extensive map coverage. One full country or region is covered by the digital map material delivered and stored in the phone with each version of Navicore Personal.

Clear guidance with icons and voice prompts.

Send map or coordinates as an MMS/SMS-message.

Flexible search features and POI-directory.

Dial-a-POI. Most POI-directory entries have phone numbers which you can conveniently call directly from the map dispay.

After SiRF announcement of SiRFInstantFix, a service that reduces the start up time of GPS systems u-blox annonced a similar service called Assisted GPS (A-GPS).

February 3, 2006 — u-blox AG, the leading Swiss provider of innovative GPS receiver technology, today announced the provision of Assisted GPS (”A-GPS”) services that supply instant location information, reducing GPS receivers’ Time To First Fix (”TTFF”) to just a few seconds.

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Volkswagen, Google, and nVidia, are working on an in-car navigation system that is 3-dimensional and more real looking than anything that’s available today. This system will display the route in a photorealistic way using images from Google Earth. Something that at least sound very interesting and a great improvement over the current available systems. According to reports this new technology was presented at CES but for a strange reason it went totally unnoticed. Imagine being able to see real photos of the POI (like restaurants, gas stations etc) in the nearby area.

This is going to be a real breakthrough in navigation and GPS systems if it delivers what is promised.

Driver and Passenger will be able to instinctively recognize where they are in relation to the surrounding topography, especially in urban areas that are depicted with depth and accurate size relationships between buildings and roads.

Via Geekzone

Technorati Tags: GPS, navigation, volkswagen, google

i-mate has released their first GPS enabled PDA, the i-mate PDA-N. This new PDA runs on Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC and is powered by a 300MHz Samsung processor. It has a 2.83″ 240×320 pixels (64k colors) transmissive TFT-LCD screen. The i-mate PDA-N can reproduce WAV, WMA, AMR, and MP3 music files, as well as M-JPEG/WMV video files. To ensure good connectivity it has built in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities
The specification of the GPS include

Embedded GPS antenna
Support NMEA 0183 version 3.0 or above
WAAS-enabled, 12 parallel channel GPS receiver:
Acquisition time
Hot start: 8 seconds, typical TTFF
Warm start: 60 seconds, typical TTFF
Cold start: 120 seconds, typical TTFF
GPS Accuracy:
Position: < 15 meters, 95% typical
Velocity: 0.05 meter/sec steady state
WAAS Accuracy:
Position: < 5 meters, 95% typical
Velocity: 0.05 meter/sec steady state

Via Digital Lifestyles

XRoad GPS is one of the first, if not the first GPS device that can help you find your way around the world. It is manufactured by a Korean company called Carpoint and it comes preloaded with maps of North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. XRoad runs on Windows CE.Net 4.2 and is powered by a 300MHz CPU. It has a 3.5 inch TFT display with a resolution of 320×240 and a 12 channel GPS receiver.

Garmin has announced that in cooperation with Buel, they have released Buel Quest, a portable navigation system for motorcycles. The unit features automatic routing and turn-by-turn voice-prompted directions to addresses or points of interest like lodging, restaurants, and Buell dealers and service centers. Buel Quest has 115 MB of memory for loading maps while some of its other features include.

Rugged, waterproof case
Flip up antenna
256 Color Display
WAAS-enabled, 12 parallel channel receiver
10 hours battery life
USB interface
Size: 4.5” W x 2.2” H x 0.9” D (11.4 x 5.6 x 2.3 cm)
Weight: 5.5 oz (171 g)

Simrad Yachting and Lowrance have announced that the former has aquired all of the outstanding shares of Lowrance.

Simrad Yachting AS and Lowrance Electronics, Inc. announced today that Simrad Yachting has agreed to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Lowrance for $37 per share. The acquisition price represents an enterprise value for Lowrance of approximately $215 million and a premium of 48% over the closing price of its shares on Friday, January 27, 2006.

Read the rest of the press release

BenQ-Siemens has started shipping the BenQ-Siemens SXG75 in Europe. The SXG75 is the first 3G cellphone from Siemens. The device has a wealth of features such as an integrated GPS receiver, a 2MP camera, a second camera for video conferencing, a large 2.2-inch color display, an organizer as well as an RDS radio, MP3 and video player. It has an internal memory of 128 MB but only 64 of them are usable. However, the available memory can be expanded to as much as 1 gigabyte simply by using RS (reduced-size) multimedia cards. Despite the rumors and most of the news posts about the SXG75 that report that it’s the first GPS enabled mobile phone to run on linux, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

SiRF Technology announced last week SiRFInstantFix, a service that will reduce the start up time of GPS systems.

Addressing the number one barrier to instant-on consumer GPS navigation systems, SiRF Technology Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRF), a leading provider of GPS-enabled silicon and premium software location platforms, today introduced SiRFInstantFix, a unique service that minimizes the start-up wait time for GPS systems. SiRFInstantFix provides consumers with the ability to turn on their SiRF-based navigation devices and achieve the first fix in as fast as eight seconds to begin navigating faster than ever before, even through urban canyons, under dense foliage and in other weak-signal conditions.
SiRFInstantFix eliminates the initial time-consuming task of obtaining precise GPS satellite location data – ephemerides – from the satellites themselves. Instead, the SiRFInstantFix server uses a sophisticated set of proprietary algorithms to predict seven days of ephemerides and distills them down to a small file which SiRF-based navigation systems can use to pinpoint every GPS satellite. Using SiRFInstantFix, today’s high-performance GPS receivers can not only start tracking satellites and navigating more quickly, they can do it using signals much weaker than those needed to obtain ephemeris data the traditional way, removing the barrier that often stands in the way of successfully navigating under very weak signal conditions.