The increasing reach of smartphones has called into question the usefulness of many dedicated devices, from music and video players, to compact cameras, and of course the ever-useful GPS. With GPS and turn-by-turn navigation almost standard equipment on Android devices, and the prevalence of iPhones, one could be forgiven for retiring their trusty nav and leaving their destination in the…
(image courtesy Chevy Truck World) Google Maps is not infallible. It’s been known to give wonky directions, as Sarah and I learned on Sunday when Google Maps mistakenly thought McCarren Park in Brooklyn was in Manhattan. Luckily we caught the mistake before we got completely lost. However, that’s nothing compared to the Google Maps fail for one NJ neighborhood, where…
What good is spending $200K on a land yacht if you end up RVing down a scary rut road that winds through the middle of Deliverance country? Sure, you could buy one of those huge atlases that they sell at every truck stop on the interstate, but this is the middle of 2011! Any self-respecting captain should have the finest…
Do you need to locate, acquisition and verify satellite links? Probably not unless you have a military title before your name or you deal in some kind of surveying industry; if that describes you, then this is probably news you’ll welcome: Coolfire Solutions has just introduced SCOUT, a Satellite Communications Operational User Toolkit which has been “engineered to assist in…
There’s a secret society stalking your streets, peering behind bushes and rummaging through parks. They work in the dead of night, or boldly move at high noon. These stealthy denizens are known to leave suspicious packages around public parks and quiet neighborhoods, and yet nobody tries to stop them. Using the latest in GPS and smartphone technology, they track hundreds…
My iPhone makes a great portable GPS system. This is particularly important because my car does not have a built-in GPS system, and my daily work has me going to a variety of locations with which I am not always familiar. Using the iPhone as a GPS works rather well for the most part. It starts up in GPS mode…
Ever since the iPhone has had a built in GPS, location based applications have been useful and popular. I have personally looked at many of these apps and love to see the innovations developers are able to come up with. Of course, it was just a matter of time before these apps started integrating with social networking as well as…
Garmin has been the undisputed leader of GPS running watches for several years. Timex and Polar have similar devices, but neither has captured running hearts quite like the Garmin Forerunner line. Nike has the “poor man’s Garmin” with their Nike+ system, and at CES they stepped it up with a new GPS-based Nike watch. According to Nike: Starting April 1st,…
I’ll admit it. I’m tough on my electronic devices – especially my phones. After a couple of years with me the cases are usually scuffed and marked. Amazingly, I’ve been lucky and not had major problems with screen scratches (even though I do NOT use screen protectors). I think my phones survive, however, because I always make sure I use…
Image courtesy of Rightway Portable GPS units are a dime a dozen these days; I think I even saw them for sale the last time I ran in to the local 7-11 for a slurpee. A few years ago I remember the GPS boom with the 3.5″ TomTom’s flying on the shelves on Black Friday and for Christmas, but I…
I have road rage issues. I tend to get very frustrated by traffic and being lost; unfortunately, I live in New Jersey and have what amounts to a completely inverted sense of direction. So it’s not uncommon to find myself stuck in traffic in a strange place, while trying to calm my frustrations…and then the GPS pipes up with a…
photo credit: PDXdj New national survey data gives an interesting, and at times frightening, picture of the driving habits of the genders. On the good side of things, 89% of women and 83% of men report having a clean driving record for the past two years. On a more neutral front while 25% of women report not trusting their sense…
CoPilot Live North America has now been updated to fully support iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 Retina Display. What does that mean? Well first off it means the app is once again usable on your iPhone if you are using an iPhone 4. When the iPhone 4 was released last week the high res screen posed a problem for…
Navigon’s latest entry into the increasingly crowded sat-nav market looks to be a cracker with a 4.3” display, Bluetooth hands-free phone and a sleek design that makes it easy to hide away when not in use. In my two week test of the Navigon 6300, it really impressed! Out of the box you get everything you need to get up…
I’ve reviewed at least three different GPS Dataloggers. There were the two loggers from Qstarz which are okay and can perform the function very well, and then there was my favorite logger, the Visiontac VGPS-900. LandAirSea has brought out one that would probably be much easier to hide than the Qstarz since it is waterproof and has other features I will get…
The iTunes App Store is filled with GPS applications. Destinator 9 from Intrinsyc is the latest addition to the category. Destinator has been running on a variety of other mobile devices and GPS units for a while now and it’s achieved a large following. The iPhone version of the application brings a rich, featured filled GPS client complete with real…
Back in June, Jason took at look at the Poynt application for the Blackberry OS. He called it a “staple” on his Blackberry and one of the best applications available. Well Poynt is back, this time with a release for the iPhone OS. The free application hit the iTunes App Store early last week, and I’ve had some time to…
A few years back, I was a big fan of OnCourse Navigator version 5 running on Windows Mobile PDAs. The interesting things here is that OCN5 was really just the name for the North American release of Navigon MobileNavigator. And although OCN 5 wasn’t terribly stable, it was one of the best-looking navigators out there at the time. So then they disappeared from the North…
For those who do not know what a GPS Data Logger is, it essentially is a GPS that usually has a sole purpose: to keep track not of where you are, but where you have been. Qstarz has been hard at work trying to improve upon the BT-Q1000x and has brought out the BT-Q1000eX Xtreme Recorder. What is different about…
Space Machine, the makers of Pocket Map navigation software for PNAs and Windows Mobile, have released Pocket Map Navigator 2010. This release doesn’t add any major new features, but rather the big news with this release is that they’ve included the newest updated Navteq maps and they’ve improved some of their routing. PocketMap Navigator has been a long-time favorite of mine…
Do you have a GPS in your car? I do, and sometimes it gets to be too much in traffic; between stop and go, lights, construction, and the sound of my GPS droning away, it can become a bit overwhelming. I’ve even been known to threaten to throw the yappy thing out the window a few times, when it all…